This week at the Curious Minds Club we continued to build the 13 Archimedean Solids. We used Polydron Frameworks and a new material – Magformers.

My Y6 girl and Y6 boy sat together and used the Polydron. They started with the Truncated Dodecahedron. I then asked them to make the Cuboctahedron, explaining that it uses the six squares from the Cube and the eight triangles from the Octahedron (hence the name). Continuing with this theme, I asked them to make the Icosidodecahedron: it uses the 20 triangles from the Icosahedron and the 12 pentagons from the Dodecahedron. They needed very little help from me to work through these.

Meanwhile I introduced my Y1 girl, Y1 boy and Y5 boy to Magformers. The younger children can find it hard to snap together the Polydron pieces so I wanted to try them on a material that uses magnets to join the pieces together. I started them on all five Platonic Solids, asking them to use a picture of the net to make the shape in two dimensions, then lift it up and join the edges together. This worked really well. Even the Icosahedron comes together well, provided you work from one end to make one half, then switch to the other end, make the other half and bring them together.

My Year 1 girl was then determined to have a go at the Truncated Icosahedron in Polydron. She had seen an older girl make one last week and must have thought “I can do that”. With some reminders that every pentagon is surrounded by hexagons she was able to complete this one. She took it out to show her mum at the end and looked very proud.

I asked my Y1 boy to make a Cuboctahedron in Magformers, from a picture of its net. He cracked the net and just needed a little help lifting it up and joining the edges. He then made some fun shapes: a fish, hourglass and small star.

My Y5 boy also made the Cuboctahedron in Magformers. He then asked for ‘something harder’ so I showed him the net of the Icosidodecahedron, which he cracked. Not content with this, he went on to make a copy of the Compound of Two Tetrahedron (not an Archimedean Solid but I brought my model with me again as it is such a nice thing to look at). He worked really hard to figure out where each of the 24 triangles should go.

Here are the photos.

Y6 girl. Truncated Dodecahedron; Icosidodecahedron.

 

Y6 boy. Truncated Dodecahedron; Cuboctahedron.

 

Y1 girl. Truncated Icosahedron.

 

Y1 boy. Cuboctahedron; Fish; Hourglass; two views of a Small Star; one of the Dodecahedrons.

 

Y5 boy. Cuboctahedron; one of the Dodecahedrons; Icosidodecahedron; Compound of Two Tetrahedra.

 

At the end of the session it is irresistible to build some towers.

 

This one gets bigger and bigger. It ended with a Tetrahedron on top, then threatened to topple over so we had to stop.