Equivalence material

I have to be honest, I was daunted by this material. It is big, it's expensive, it's extremely precise and it seems to only be available from neinhaus which is even more expensive than normal expensive. My only option really was to make it, but, as mentioned before, it's so precise! The whole point of it is to be exact, shapes that are congruent are 'exactly' the same.

I thought about several materials, thick card was first, very thick card like mount card was next but I wanted the pieces to have real depth to them. Corrugated card was a strong contender and I may even go there if I have to remake any but I avoided it because of its tendency to squash on the corners. In the end I went for foam board, it is good because it cuts cleanly, but not ideal because the edges can crumble if you're not careful. It's saving grace was the price tag, £4.99 per board and I used 2, so £9.98 total compared to over £260 just for the square figures from neinhause. Of course they are amazing quality, made from iron, durable, exact and so on, but really, £260!

I made the square figures, the triangle figures and a circle for learning the parts of a circle (chords, arc etc). First I cut 14 squares (14 x 14 cm), then I very carefull measured, drew and cut out the centre shape. Making sure all the squares were the same and all the triangles were the same. I made these as precise as possible using a ruler protractor and set square.  Next I just cut up the centre pieces into half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth pieces. I say 'just' but it took ages, as you can see they are not exactly exact but they are very close and I am happy with them. I then stuck the frames down onto some mount card I had around and then finished it all with a few coats of spray paint.

The very small pieces are a little bit delicate but this is an elementary material so it should be fine and so far the coats of paint have stopped any of the crumbling edges. I think that it will be strong enough to cope with my children but it probably wouldn't survive several classes full so I can see why the schools buy the iron.

Days of learning - elementary

Ok, so pretty much the day after posting all those pictures of our school room, I started seeing all it's imperfections and problems and got the urge to move it around. I am always moving the house around, my family are very understanding! I ended up moving the entire school room down to the kitchen and getting a lounge back. After our first week down there we are all really liking it, it is great to have access to the sink for practical life and science activities and there is more floor and table space. It took me about 14 hours to move everything but it was time well spent.

Binx used the hierarchical material this week, comparing sizes, labelling, discovering the families of numbers (simple, thousand, million) and how that relates to where we put the commas in numbers. She was very impressed with the size difference between the 1 cube and the 1,000,000 cube, so was I really, it's quite impressive to see it in such a hands on way. 

On Wednesday, after 2 days using the hierarchical material, binx started using the large bead frame, practicing building large numbers and then reading large numbers that I built. We then did some addition to practice the exchanging of beads. This work was mostly just to get used to the frame and feel comfortable with 'reading' it.

We did some work looking at the composition of the earth. We looked at the different layers in terms of what to call them (barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere), and related it to the density experiment where you put the syrup, water and oil in a jar and you get the separate layers. This is because everything settles according to its weight so in the earth the barysphere is heaviest, then the lithosphere etc. As you can see from the picture below, we also looked at the relative thicknesses of each layer. Binx was pretty interested in the hydrosphere (water!) so we did an experiment to show how much fresh water there is in the world. You get a great big bowl of water which represents all the water in the world and you take about 4 tbsp and freeze it to show all the fresh water in the world which is frozen and then 2 tbsp which shows all the fresh water in the world that all living things have to share. All the rest of the water in the bowl is salt water. Pretty mind blowing actually. 

We have been learning to play Chinese chess. My parents brought this set back from Vietnam last year but we haven't played it until now. It is similar to western chess but with some important differences and some great pieces (we have elephants and chariots instead of bishops and rooks!). 

I was busy with Rogue at one point and when I came back, Binx had made herself a den with a blanket over two chairs and was inside exploring an electronics set. 

We explored polygons and learnt some new quadrilateral names like the rhombus and parallelogram. Note: everyone should try to have a two year old present while learning the word parallelogram, lots of fun! 

We finished up the week with a review on the states of matter, solid, liquid and gas. This was mostly review work but we added in a few extras like changing a solid with heat, (melting wax), and making holes in the side of a tin to show how a liquid pushes sideways as well as down but a solid only pushes down.