Coming soon to a dinner table near you . . .
The boy has been studying geometric solids in school and brought home a tetrahedron pattern (like a pyramid with a triangle base). We glued it to cardstock and then glued it together. He colored one, two and three dots on three of the sides and a set of scary teeth on the last side.
Then he made up a game, Grabbermouth, to play with his pyramid shaped die. Simple and surprisingly fun! Each player rolls the die in turn hoping to be the first to add dots to equal six. If the “grabbermouth” lands face down you lose all your points. This was easier for the girl using tokens so she didn’t forget how many points she had. He then set to making a similar die with a cardstock cube.
The rules for Double Grabbermouth got a bit more complicated. I was impressed with his creative use of the shapes and his ability to create the rules to a new game that probably owed a bit of inspiration to the dreidel game but certainly has its own character.
Links are included to templates from Zoomschool so you can make your own geometric solid shapes from paper.
Tags: kids art, paper crafting
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My sister taught the boys how to make origami tetrahedrans. You make “units” – then they interlock to form the tetrahedron.
You can also use the units to make cubes… or my boy’s favorites, colliding cubes.Here are instructions on how to do it…
https://www.math.lsu.edu/~verrill/origami/tetraunit/
As you probably know… Piero’s the same age as boy, and he’s a master at this. Once they learn how to make the units – they can make a variety of cool shapes.
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