Well, I had fun, anyway. I think Sammie was a little frustrated. You see, every week she has to bring home her math test and we have to work through the problems that she missed. The first one that she missed this time was about pentagons. She was supposed to draw four of them and color in (shade) to show 3 1/2. She had drawn them all teeny tincy and squishy so it didn’t really look like it represented 3 1/2. I sat there thinking of how a pentagon looks in my head, so that I could help her, and all that my brain was supplying was a stop sign, which is six sides. So I knew that wasn’t right – so I headed to the internet. I found some cool websites with information on pentagons. And I showed her what a pentagon should look like. And then I went off to start dinner – or balance the checking accounts – or something…
And when I came back, she had definitely drawn five-sided shapes, but, the bottom lines on the sides were straight up and down – so it looked like when a child draws a house. And I was not sure her teacher was going to accept that, or even if that qualified as a pentagon. So I went searching online some more. And I discovered that her shapes were indeed pentagons, but, they were irregular pentagons. So they did qualify. I suppose we’ll see if her teacher accepts that or not. I stressed to her that they were irregular pentagons, so that if she discussed it with her teacher, she could point that out. Now – her teacher could obviously counter with, “Yes, but, I wanted regular pentagons.” In which case Sammie would have to do them again, but, at least she could have an intelligent conversation with her teacher about it. And being that Sammie is as polite as can be, I felt safe arming her with that information. If I had a child that would sass the teacher, or rudely argue with the teacher, I would never help her out in that way.
Anyway, so let me tell you about the sites online that I enjoyed so much. The first place I went to was Wikipedia. I just love Wikipedia and their page about pentagons definitely had some cool information! From there, we visited one of the links in the External Links section. And boy, did we have fun there! It is the Math Open Reference site, and we had tons of fun playing with the pentagons there!
You can work with either a regular pentagon, or an irregular pentagon and drag its corners all around to change the size and even the shape (of the irregular one).
Sammie had long since run off, and Patrick and I were left playing with all of the polygons on that site! I think we had the most fun playing with the undecagon and the dodecagon!
The highest polygon that I remember learning in school was the octagon, so I was just having a field day with these long, silly words! And Patrick got to, one more time, laugh at his poor ‘ol ma!
I think I asked him about fifteen times – “Have you changed your undecagon?” Haha!
