What Does a Math Teacher Do in the Summer?

I was so inspired the other day on Pinterest by these fascinating looking sculptures that 5th grade students made! (http://spaldingart.blogspot.com/2012/01/5th-grade-polyhedrons.html)

I decided I needed to give it a try.

So, I explored the links that I found on the website above.  This project looked fun and challenging!

Here is how it went for me.

1) I started with the template given on the website.  I didn't want the pieces that big though, so I copied, cut, and pasted, and made the template into a size that was manageable for me.  I got 5 pieces onto one sheet of paper.

2) I thought … ugh a lot of cutting!  So, I got out my trusty, rusty Silhouette Cameo and used the print and Cut feature.  This was a lot easier than cutting out all 30 pieces.  (Let me know if you would like to try this and I can post my Cameo Print and Cut File)

3)  Here is what I had after I cut the pieces.

4)  One of the tips given on the above website is to make sure that all of your pieces are facing the same direction, so I piled all of the pieces into a pile so I was sure they were all going in the same direction.  I put a dot on the face of each one.

5)  I then started building - I really had no idea what I was doing at this point - LOL.

6)  As I continued to build, I noticed that the pieces come together in either sets of 3 or sets of 5 and seem to alternate.  This is a picture of about half of the project complete.

7)  As I got closer to the end, it was harder and harder to get the pieces together!  As I got to the place where I didn't think any more pieces could fit in, I realized that there was NO WAY I was going to be able to use all 30 of the pieces.  So, KUDOS to the 5th graders that figured this one out!  In fact, I didn't use 6 of the pieces.

I still think my final design looks cool, but not quite the same :)