Going Nuts

While my son was taking our dog for a lunchtime walk I considered what math lesson we could do next: reviewing multiplication facts, metric measuring, and/or review different kinds of angles. Then he came into the house all excited, with a handful of horse chestnuts. "Can we go gather more now?" He pleaded. I considered. 

You know how sometimes you look back and realize that was the last time you did [ x ]? Well, this is possibly the last year one of my children is going to come running to ask me to come along collecting chestnuts. So we went out with a basket. 

Each spiky seed pod on the ground contained new treasures, never before seen. I love these shiny brown chestnuts, even if they aren't the edible variety. They look like hand-dipped chocolates, or caramels. 

"Manipulatives" can add such pleasure to an otherwise dry math lesson. We played a game of reaching into the basket of nuts, pulling out a fistful, and writing down all the possible multiplication problems to represent this amount. This led to John's rediscovery of prime numbers: 11 nuts can only be written as 11x1 or 1x11. After a couple examples he was able to remember and define what "prime" meant. Then, starting with one nut, adding one more at a time, he generated a list of prime numbers up to 31. Next I asked him to start in the center of a large sheet of paper, draw a line 1 cm long, turn at a right angle, draw a line off of it that is the next prime number (2 cm) and so on. What an interesting form took shape! Tomorrow (probably) we'll use tracing paper and draw curves nestled into all the right angles and discover the universal spiral this forms, and look for where in nature such spirals occur. 

So you see what can spiral out of a little spontaneous nut gathering!