![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Crashing the grade three class party
Dec. 17th, 2010 06:06 pmI showed up about half an hour before the end of the school day. Within seconds, I was lamenting that I'd forgotten to bring a deck of cards. Ever resourceful, I pulled out the coloured tiles instead - little squares of plastic, uniform in size, in five different colours.
"Gather round while I show you something cool!" I said. I laid out one green tile and surrounded it with red ones, one for each edge, making an x shape. Then I took a few more green ones and surrounded the red ones, again so that no red edges were on the outside.
"How many red ones are there?" Four, came the answer. "How many green ones?" Nine. "Oh, those are interesting numbers. Four is two times two, and nine is three times three. Let's see what happens when we add another." We kept going, finding to their surprise that the pattern continued - 16 red ones after the next round, 25 green ones after the following, 36 greens. Then we took the two colours apart and I asked them to see if they could form them into a square of each individual colour.
In fifteen minutes of messing around with two colours of tiles, I taught a bunch of grade threes about square numbers up to 36, and they never even noticed they were learning it. I also managed to keep them from noticing that one of their classmates puked about ten feet away from where we were playing. And all of them were in the middle of massive sugar-highs at the time.
"Gather round while I show you something cool!" I said. I laid out one green tile and surrounded it with red ones, one for each edge, making an x shape. Then I took a few more green ones and surrounded the red ones, again so that no red edges were on the outside.
"How many red ones are there?" Four, came the answer. "How many green ones?" Nine. "Oh, those are interesting numbers. Four is two times two, and nine is three times three. Let's see what happens when we add another." We kept going, finding to their surprise that the pattern continued - 16 red ones after the next round, 25 green ones after the following, 36 greens. Then we took the two colours apart and I asked them to see if they could form them into a square of each individual colour.
In fifteen minutes of messing around with two colours of tiles, I taught a bunch of grade threes about square numbers up to 36, and they never even noticed they were learning it. I also managed to keep them from noticing that one of their classmates puked about ten feet away from where we were playing. And all of them were in the middle of massive sugar-highs at the time.