Meeting on 7th December, 2018

Material for meeting 5

Activities laid out in room 1/2 at this meeting:

• Pattern blocks, polydron, snakes and ladders
• skip counting mazes
• fractals:
  • How to fold and cut an equilateral triangle - this is needed for these activities
  • diminishing Christmas tree - [*]
  • Fractal Christmas tree (Sierpinski triangle) [wiki page]
    • version one
    • complementary version
  • Fractal Koch snowflake [wiki page]
  Lots of web pages on fractals, e.g., out door maths fractals
• Puzzles with one, two and three mirrors (last is Kalidoscope)
• six pointed stars - folding and cutting
  • How to fold and cut, including how to cut hexagon
  • examples
  • questions about symmetry
• origami, mostly from [**], which has lots more, which some children were folding too.
  • doily dove, robin, snowman
  • five pointed star [pentagon] and [star]
  • dodecahedron (slightly different from the one last week)
• No glue paper chain - [*]
• We also had a Santa's best route puzzle, and a colour by number Christmas tree, both from [*]
• Liverpool fun maths road show puzzles: pink(-1): HH, II, KK, LL, NN, RR, XX; blue(0): A, B, E, L, M, O, P, T, U; yellow: 28, 32, 42, 48; blue(4): 85, 90, 92, 95; pink(7): 151, 161, 162, 172, 174

references. Several of the activities were taken or inspired by the following books:

• [*] Math circles for elementary school students
• [**] Christmas Origami, by Steve and Megumi Biddle

Marco's sessions in room3:

• 4-6: skip counting with drumming
• 7-9: skip counting with mazes and drumming; return to card trick puzzle
• 10+: Probability: car-goat problem - also called the Monty Hall problem - see
  • Marco's description
  • Peter Taylors explanation
  • Wiki page

I also brought along Ian Stewart's book "what shape is a snowflake", and put it near the snowflakes table - more for the grown ups or older children to look at. This is very similar to his book "The beauty of numbers in nature", which you can get out of Warwickshire libraries. Unfortunately neither really have enough pictures of snowflakes. A better option for pictures, you should be able to get "Field Guide to Snowflakes" by Kenneth Libbrech from the local library too. Kenneth Libbrecht seems to have written several books on snowflakes. Snowflakes are a great way for children to explore geometry