Thursday 14 July 2016

Day 4 of the Butterfly project - Maths: STEP by STEP caterpillar geometry

I've been trying to think of ways to get maths into our butterfly project as much as possible and came up with this project.   

As we learnt yesterday, caterpillar eggs come in various shapes sizes, some are tubular in shape, some round and others oval, so in this project we make a caterpillar egg and the turn it into a caterpillar...  Just for FUN!  Here's how we made ours...


 


STEP  ONE

Draw a rectangle.  Make it 3cm by 14cm.

To ensure the angles of your rectangle is right use a protractor. All the angles are meant to be 90 degrees.

Maths fact: All the angles on a quadrilateral adds up to 360 degrees 

STEP TWO

Using  a compass set it to 1.5cm like this...



Then draw a semi circle at both ends of your rectangle.

STEP THREE

Now measure two centimeters in from one end of the rectangle we made in STEP ONE and then draw a line to make a small rectangle within it like this...


 


STEP FOUR

Measure and mark with a pencil 2cm from the top of the inside line of the small rectangle and 2cm from the bottom of the line joined to the semi circle.  Use these marks and the corners of the small rectangle to make triangles like in the photo below.

 

These two bigger triangles are isosceles and the smaller ones are right angle triangles.

Maths Fact: the three angles inside a triangle always add up to 180 degrees!


STEP FIVE

Mark 1 cm down from the inside line of the small rectangle and 1cm up from the inside line of the small rectangle and then join the dots to the corners of the newly made isosceles triangles to make smaller right angle triangles, like so...

 

STEP SIX

Now colour it in!

We were thinking of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle, when we made ours so we coloured the semi circles in red, the large rectangle in green and the triangles orange.

 

STEP SEVEN

Then we cut it out carefully.  

If you like, before you rearrange the pieces and put them back together, you can draw a background on an A4 piece of paper.  Something like this...

 

Then stick your shapes on the picture to make a caterpillar shape like this...




What we learnt from this project:


  • Counting
  • Measuring
  • Shapes
  • Angles
  • Practicing using a compass and ruler 


1 comment:

  1. Would this actually help kids to learn maths? I mean its fun to do things like this but do the kids grasp any new informative thing?

    ReplyDelete