History of Geometry - Revisited

Last academic year while we were going through our great lessons, I had presented to Disha, the Story of Geometry.  While she listened to the story it did not spark any new interests in her.  A new opportunity presented itself again this time.

As far as Math goes we do not strictly only do Montessori.  You would have seen various blog posts where we combine Singapore and RightStart Math with Montessori.  This is partly because of D's learning style.  While she likes the concrete aspect of learning things, she finds it cumbersome to use the manipulatives to gain mastery of the facts.  So while I present the initial concepts the Montessori way, repetition of the works does not happen here.  She prefers the pencil and paper workbook style for that.  We don't do only workbook/teacher's manual style here, since scripted lessons and strict lesson plans are not our style here.  Hence we mix things up quite a bit here.

Lately Disha has mastered most of the concepts needed to complete RightStart Level C.  I had been eyeing the Beast Academy books since September.  In anticipation of the completion of the RS Level, I ordered the first set of books available.  We are in love!  The concepts we've covered so far are about angles, which we had already covered in Montessori.  The comic book style format is new for us plus the workbook is not just mundane, repetitive stuff.  The work book contains puzzles and mazes that can be solved only using Mathematical concepts which works well with her.

Not totally wanting to give up the wholesome view to subjects that Montessori provides instead of compartmentalizing them into their own discrete boxes, I wanted to integrate a little bit of history with the Geometry lessons.

We started off talking about the Egyptian use of Geometry and how the Greek Mathematicians studied that as a Science.  My sources are from Montessori for Everyone and the Cultivating Dharma Albums.

 We also did a small exercise with the knotted rope like the harpenodapta - the Egyptian rope strechers. Montessori for Everyone suggests using a rope 3 feet long, I did not have it on hand, so we used a small piece of yarn and knotted it at 3, 4 and 5 inches respectively.  D got the idea so thats good!

Disha then decided to note all of this down on paper.

Then it was time for some creativity with the yarn and the pin board!

Anyway this time the lesson and Disha's interest in it was way different than before.  She is older and more into Geometry now.

D's Latest Art/Geometry Obsessions

I mentioned D's latest obsession with Geometric Patterns in my last post.  I wanted to post a few of her art works from recent days.  She has free handed some of these, used the shapes from the Geometric Cabinet or just used a ruler and paper.  She meticulously works for hours on each of these and would rather be doing only this than anything else all day!

She awarded me with this the other day appreciating me for helping her with something!

You should be able to see some curvilinear triangles in the above design.  She hand drew some of this.

We also have this Mandala Designer and this provides with hours of drawing time.

She is obsessed with creating patterns and tessellating with Pattern Blocks.

She creates such elaborate designs that I am thinking it would be good to get more geometric shapes and may be another set of the same shapes so she will have enough for her designs!

Geometry: Quadrilaterals

We did not do much Montessori work in the last couple of weeks.  The reason is that D is having Swimming Lessons and it is right after lunch.  It takes around 20 mins for us to get there and we need to eat an hour before the session.  This reduces our morning work time considerably, hence we've skipped the school room altogether.  We are working on some Language and Math workbooks, instead.  I picked these up at various Garage sales and some were given to us by a friend.  D loves working on these and I am glad that we get some school work done!  She will do 5-6 pages in each book at one sitting!  Math is the slowest though.

The rest of the afternoon and evening is spent playing outside, having fun in the sun!

After a long time D, went inside the school room today!  Seems like she missed the Montessori works!  She randomly picked the Quadrilateral tray from the Geometric Cabinet.  This was part of the order from Caliber Montessori that I picked up during their clearance sale.

She also worked on the 3-part cards.  I got these from Kid Advance.  They are awesome quality and saved me a lot of time from printing and laminating.

Then she proceeded to create a booklet of the various shapes on my suggestion, but she was so focussed on getting this booklet completed!  We used metal inset paper for the inside and construction paper for the cover.

She also then proceeded to work on the Constructive Triangle, box 1 to create the various quadrilaterals.

This is an older photo of D working on Box 1, I just did not take one today!

Since there is some new interest in the Geometry area, I want to create a Geometry station with various activities in Geometry.  I've a list of materials the I want to make using ideas that I've gathered from the various blogs and my plan is to start and finish everything by this summer, right on time for the next school year!