Monday, October 11, 2010

Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to work I go! Yay!

Back to School today!
Oh I love my job! I work with the most amazing people, it was almost like a family reunion coming back after 2 weeks of holidays!

Term 3 seems like it was months ago, but once I got into my classroom it was like I had never had a holiday (in a good way). My kids are so fun! I really like them! This morning I got them to write expositions (persuasive essays) on whether students should wear a school uniform. My favourite was a very passionate (she even used capitals for emphasis) "when we don't wear the right uniform we get DEHYDRATED by the teachers!" Um, yes that's right, if you wear the wrong shoes to school we take all liquids from you! haha.

During the holidays our Junior School playground almost got a make-over... but the special rubber stuff they were putting on the ground became bubbly (it's not meant to), then the guy got gastro and now the foreman's apparently quit, so they only got a 2 metre strip done, so the term has started with the playground roped off... BUT there is an amazing new 3 metre tall 'spiderman' climbing frame in the playground! I so can't wait till we the kids can play on it! It looks like this, but is red with blue web:
It's such an interesting shape! Of course, I made a lesson out of it! We spent the afternoon discussing 3D-shapes, edges, corners, faces (even invisible ones), polygons (did you know that the 'gon' in polygon actually comes from the word for 'knee' hehe! so 'polygon' = 'many knees', my kids love that definition), pyramids, prisms and -hedrons. I got the kids to count how many edges the new play equipment's frame had, and come and get that many matchsticks off me to make a 3D model of it. Well we obviously need to work on counting in my class, some kids only needed 18 sticks, while others asked for 54. hmm. Well we're going to finish the models tomorrow, I'll try and take some photos to post.

After the kids went home I had to make my own model (curiosity was too much for me!). It was harder than I thought. But I did find out that there are 20 (invisible) triangular faces, 30 edges and 12 vertices on our spider-ball.  Anyone know what shape this is called? Google had to help me out with this one. It's (don't tell my kids, this is their homework for tonight)... an icosahedron.

There ends the maths lesson for the day.

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