Inspired by a post on Christopher Danielson’s (yes, the author of the book and teacher resource Which One Doesn’t Belong?) blog called Talking Math With Your Kids, I created a set of geometry tiles. Always up to a crafty challenge, I thought…hmmm, I could make those! Christopher has created a one-pager of instructions as part of his Math on a Stick project for the Minnesota State Fair.

I found some balsa slats at Michael’s (teachers get a discount with a teacher card, just ask) and cut them to a 2 to 1 ratio which fortunately, gave me a set of smaller tiles of the same proportions.

I painted front and back sides and edges with diluted acrylic paint although they could also be left plain. I marked the midpoint of one long side with a sharpie and used regular adhesive tape to tape off from the midpoint to each corner.

I used black acrylic paint to paint in the triangles creating by the taping.

And when the tiles were dry, I played around with what I could create with them. So much composing and decomposing of shapes!

I used these geometry tiles as part of our mathematical tablescape at our Provincial Numeracy Project meetings to oohs and aahs.

I’m looking forward to seeing how some students investigate these tiles!

~Janice