Saturday, December 31, 2011

Building a Bigger Pyramid - Marshmallow and Toothpick Tetrahedrons Take II

I had every intention of posting a number of video links, and book recommendations to round out, and finish off our "chocolate week". But, what started out this morning, as a quick and easy boredom buster for the younger children...


...turned into a full scale family building project...


...as the older children joined in, to end out the year in an effort to outdo...


...A's marshmallow and toothpick Sierpinski inspired creation from the first of the year.


It took all day, two bags of marshmallows, and somewhere around five boxes of toothpicks, but we did it!


Unfortunately, one of our tetrahedral towers proved unstable, and before I had even finished snapping photos...


...we realized our pyramid was becoming a kinetic sculpture.


That proved to be entertaining, too.


Eying the destruction, we realized it really was only one of the structures that had failed.


And, with some quick work we were able to rescue the other three.


The younger children want to fix up the failed tetrahedron, too...


...but they have they have quite a bit of work ahead, enough at least, to last us into the new year.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

9 comments:

  1. Wow! That was a HUGE marshmallow structure! Amazing! Look at the fun they had!

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  2. Amazing...marshmellows + creativity + toothpicks = learning and stretching one's imagaination :)

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  3. Whoa, so cool! When I clicked on the link I was not expecting such big pyramids. How fun!

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  4. This is amazing! Building with marshmallows is definitely on this year's "non-existing to do list"

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  5. Wow! That's a huge structure to be made of marshmallows and toothpicks! That's pretty cool.

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  6. So cool. We tried it ourselves and thought you might like to see what you and your kids inspired: http://mathinyourfeet.blogspot.com/2012/01/marshmallow-math-solids-sculpture.html

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  7. This is such a fun activity! I have been doing this in my public school classroom at the end of the Ancient Egyptian Unit. Great way to incorporate creativity, collaboration and fun!

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