Tracking Trapezoids

Joy and I have been looking for shapes a lot lately. It all started with a Montessori Geometry App for the iPad. It's by Les Trois Elles and available in the iTunes App Store. It's a great app with activities for kids from 2-10! I've even learned some things. The younger children can put shapes into puzzle forms; the older students work with patterns, determining how one shape is different from three others, etc. Joy likes the app, and so do I!

We started paying attention to shapes around our home, like these bricks. We named them rectangles first... then quadrilaterals... then parallelograms. Joy was learning a lot from playing with her app!







We started finding parallel lines everywhere. I would point them out at first, then Joy started finding them. We found them on our craft table and our floor. We found them on sidewalks and between bricks. And of course, we had lots of fun seeing them everywhere!

Joy learned that squares tipped on their sides are what she calls diamonds. That squares and her diamonds are both rhombuses. That squares are always rectangles, but diamonds are sometimes kites, not rectangles.

And we both learned that it's EASY to find rectangles in the real world. Triangles are pretty easy, too. Squares and diamonds are plentiful. But those trapezoids...

We searched high and low for trapezoids! Joy was looking for isoceles trapezoids and right-angled trapezoids. I was watching pretty much everywhere we went for trapezoids. We talked about trapezoids, and why they wouldn't be used very often for architecture (which is where we found many of the other shapes). But we couldn't find trapezoids.

Until we found THIS building! Joy was bouncing and twirling when she found these trapezoids! It has rectangles, squares, parallelograms, and many other shapes, but the trapezoids were special. She insisted I take pictures of the trapezoids...

And when we went inside the building, we found MORE trapezoids in the stonework! To the left, you can see Joy pointing to two right-angled trapezoids, fit together to make a rectangle. We spent lots of time examining the shapes in the stonework; the trapezoids were worth it!





So is the learning. We continue our quest to find shapes in our world.