Final flight of tetrahedral kites

The tetrahedral kites were a complete success.  Each student built one small one, then we combined them to make 4 medium sized ones, then combined the medium sized ones to make one big one.  The small and the medium kites flew great.  Unfortunately the big one did not take flight.  I am sure the only reason it did not fly was because we had flown the small medium sized ones quite a bit before contstructing the big one, so each one had a slight bit of damage to it.   But overall a great project for the spring!



Above the kids are flying the small and medium kites, they flew great!
Middle we combined 16 small kites (4 medium kites) to make the big kite.
Below is the attempt to fly the big kite.



Building an Ancient City

We are currently strudying Rome in SS 8.  We were talking about the geography of Rome and were going to talk about the important geographical features of Rome.  Before we had this discussion, I got the students to create their own ancient cities and to identify and describe the ten most important features of their city.  Initially I was going to have them draw them out, but then thought playdough would be great for this.  They did a great job and put a lot of thought into it.  Once they created it with playdough, they wrote down on paper what the important features were and why they were important.

Tetrahedral Kites

We just finished our unit on volume and surface area of prisms.  They wrote a test and then I wanted to do something fun as an end project.  I decided on two activities:

1.  The first one was to build a more complicated 3-D figure out of a given net.

2.  The second one was to build tetrahedral kites.  It has been a real success, the students are really into in and they just want to keep building them.  It has been a great way to help the students recognise how to build a 3-D object and learn about volume and surface area of them.  We are still working on them and planning on flying the bigger ones (photo #2) and then making one really big one and attempting to fly that.  We will be doing some calculations on surface area and volume of the different sized kites as well.  I will attach another video of flying the bigger kites next week.


Each student made 4 mini tetrahedrons and then built this kite



Out flying the kites

This is four students that put their tetraherdons together to make a bigger one.

We are currently working on putting 4 of these together to make an even bigger one.