Jul 28, 2015

WonderWorks: Spirals!


Today we explored the natural shape of a Spiral in nature (or a Fibonacci Spiral, but our young mathematicians didn't need to get that technical to explore!) -- a guest post by Rebecca Pettyjohn

Today's Topic: Spirals
Supplies:
Homemade playdough  (I got my great recipe here)
Laminated spiral pages
Spiral cut outs (we have a great die cut!)
Scissors
Spiral whirlygigs (from www.babbledabbledo.com)
Pine Cones
Sea Shells
Painters tape
Carpet squares
Glue, scissors, wiggly eyes, and pompom balls
Our bodies! 


Book: 
cover art Swirl by swirl : spirals in nature / Sidman, Joyce  


 What kids do: 
make spirals with their hands:

And then with everyone together to make an even bigger one! The longer the line, the bigger the spiral!

Create their own animals with spirals 

Use playdough to find natural spirals in pinecones,

And in sea shells

Use fine motor skills to cut spiral whirlygigs out of paper

 some turned into pets on a leash....

And to roll lines into spirals out of playdough 
Explore gross motor skills of how it feels to walk (or hop!) in a spiral shape

This very young artist was inspired to draw some free-hand spirals
 
Adult Challenge of the week:  Use the vocabulary word “spiral” when talking to your kids today. It is a VERB and a NOUN! 

Hindsight Tip:  We needed more of a variation in our natural spirals to press into the dough. It would have been better to be more prepared (sigh, like always) to have some other flowers, shells, or even succulents we could use to press since it was a very popular activity! 

Variations to try: 
I would love to try this Spiral pendulumAnd the exploration of man made spirals might be fun too. Possibly a pipe cleaner or wire activity for bending spirals?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Template developed by Confluent Forms LLC; more resources at BlogXpertise