The other day I bought a geometry set for less than £3 at a stationary sale, and left it on the table. Guess what happened? Tiger saw it and became really excited when he realised that it belongs to him.
The following was what I saw:
What was he doing? Drawing circles, apparently.
Tiger became more adventurous in the following days, still pouring over his tools:
His designs also got bolder as a result.
All this while, Tiger didn't ask me anything so I just let him get on with it. It was only when he showed me his work that I realised that he was teaching himself the measurement of angles in relation to a circle. I have mentioned angles in passing so it isn't totally unknown to him, but I like how he has shaded the different parts of the circles to highlight their corresponding angles (90 degrees, 180 degrees, 360 degrees).
Tiger was tickled when we walked past a sculpture of Issac Newton and saw him doing exactly the same thing:
With the examination of the properties of snowflakes from our previous science lesson on snowflakes, we followed naturally onto the mathematical aspects of this interesting phenomenom: symmetry.
We have previously touched upon the idea of symmetry so we did a quick revision with a ruler and the snow crystal prints to determine the number and types of symmetrical lines we could find in each snowflake print.
Using a protractor, we explored a little about the 60-degree angle that were very prominent in the snowflakes we examined.
Once Tiger grasped the basic understanding of the protractor and angles, he used it to mark the location of the lines of symmetry in a circle before cutting it into a hexogonal snowflake.
There was a lot of cutting involved in this series of lessons, as we learned about different ways to fold and cut our papers to achieve design we wanted.
One way to think of the line of symmetry is to regard it as the line where a mirror would be placed. With that in mind, we used a mirror to prove that the reflection in the mirror was the same as the symmetrical pattern we made.
Still working along the concept of the mirror-image/reflected image, Tiger did more excises which comprised of:
1) cutting out letters that can be formed from mirror images (capital letters A, C, E, H)
2) drawing a symmetrical figure
3) constructing symmetrical figures using T-square and different-angled triangles, then colour them in.
