Don't Be Square: The Cube Nurtures Spatial Intelligence
My students need 1000 wooden cubes and 3 boxes of glue dots.
FULLY FUNDED! Mr. K.'s classroom raised $270
This project is fully funded
This is the kind of material you'll wish you could have taken home to build the kind of spatial intelligence that brings success in geometry, those standardized tests that ask you to rotate 3-D figures and any engineering task.
I teach in a Montessori-style school, in a multi-age classroom of 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders. This school is in a high poverty and high English as second language area.
I've combined a couple of existing materials, a 3-D puzzle that's been around for 75 years and some 3-D graph paper, into a work that every child I've ever had, from the boy who was so dyslexic he could never spell his name to the girl who wrote her own stage version of Jane Eyre as a first grader, everyone of them found irresistible. The beauty of this work is that while being creative, the children are not only building neural connections in their brain as they rotate and flip the 3-D pieces into figures they create, they also are learning how to read and eventually create their own blueprints.
I've just moved from a charter school where the parents could afford to provide a Soma cube (the 3-D material we use) for their children to use at home to an inner city school where most of the children qualify for free lunch. My goal is to have the children glue together wooden cubes into the pieces that form a Soma cube and then allow the children to check out the cube, take it home and use it to create new figures which they then describe in numerical notation for other students to solve.
This material gives boys who are struggling with the pencil and paper part of school a chance to succeed. This material gives girls a chance to experience success in a domain often thought to be exclusively male.
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