Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Crazy 8s: Glow-in-the-Dark Shapes

What an exciting day this was for me! Today we kicked off Gordon-Nash's yearly outreach to the New Hampton Community School's Afterschool Program. Each Tuesday for eight weeks, I'll be presenting a "Crazy 8s" Math Club to some of the kindergarten, first, and second graders, assisted by Miss Markey, who will help link the content to the school's math programs. Math Club will be full of fun number and concept activities with interesting materials provided by the Bedtime Math Foundation. This is the fourth year that the library has offered this exciting outreach program to NHCS, and the Gordon-Nash is grateful for this collaboration with our community school.

Today club members investigated some plane (2D) geometry. We reviewed the attributes of shapes, like their sides, their angles, the perimeter. Using glow sticks, kids made regular polygons like triangles, squares, and hexagons, then experimented with repeating patterns of shapes. Most of this, we did in a darkened room, so we could watch our work glow!

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