Math Is Real Life: December

The first Wednesday of each month is a fun link up hosted by:

  4mulaFun, The Teacher Studio, Teaching to Inspire in 5th, 

AND MissMathDork, called 

Math is Real Life.

I love the premise of the link up – all of the posts included are great to share with students to show them that math really can be found everywhere!

This month our family has been spending a lot of time preparing for Christmas. While we do talk a lot about what Christmas is actually celebrating (the birth of Christ) we have fun spending time as a family doing crafts, singing Christmas songs, and watching holiday themed movies.

Last year while browsing Pinterest I found a picture of some popsicle stick snowflake decorations that looked awesome! I created one last year on my own and it’s been hanging in our living room ever since! My daughter spent all year asking when she could make her own so right after Thanksgiving we sat down together and made some new ones.  While creating I realized that there was a lot of geometry involved in each snowflake.. The snowflakes are made up of various lines, angles, triangles and rhombuses. 

This was the first snowflake created. The center is made of equilateral triangles. The outer limbs are perpendicular to the end of a particular triangle. The outside L shapes are right triangles!

This flake has a center made up of rhombi. Many types of angles are also present.

We did not use a protractor or any tools other than our brains, popsicle sticks & glue gun to create the snowflakes. You can tell that we didn't because some of the shapes are off! If we had been more careful and taken measurements we would have had a cleaner overall look!

The final snowflake we made was this "rainbow snowflake.". My 6yr old made this snowflake on her own. We had a wonderful discussion on the different types of triangles she needed to use. The center is made up of equilateral triangles. The outer triangles are isosceles triangles. 

These snowflakes look great hanging up around our house! It's been fun to quiz Dixie and see if she remembers what the various shapes are called! 

Make sure to check out the other posts included in the link up! I've browsed a few already and they are really neat to read!