Two of our girls are currently studying geometry, so they are all about shapes right now. Walking by a fence the other day brought on comments from Darragh about parallel lines, a sidewalk stone evoked observations of perpendicular sides and right angles, and we just measured the perimeter of our cheese and crackers at snack time!
But the best one yet, I think, was a recent trip to Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The place itself is beautiful; you walk across sheep-manicured fields and descend into a valley flanked by an 80 metre high curved limestone crag formed by a waterfall after the last ice age. It’s when you climb up to the top that the geometry happens; it is covered by limestone “pavement”, and is one of the few places in the world you can see this pattern of fissured rock known as clints and grykes. The actual lumps of limestone (clints) are shaped by deep fissures (grykes) formed by the flow of water from Malham Tarn, and deepened by the slightly acidic rainfall. Liah pointed out, and then jumped on, a trail of triangles, parallelograms, kites, trapezoids, squares and rectangles – not because I asked her to, just because she noticed, and we had the shared experience of learning the names of these shapes earlier in the week. So much more fun than drawing them on dot paper, and well worth my two days of very stiff calf muscles…
I guess geometry is perhaps the easiest math to make “real” for students, but I wonder if they would be making this many real-life observations if we hadn’t actually shared this learning with them? Roadschooling is giving us a unique opportunity – because we are so in tune with what our kids are learning, we can help make it relevant for them. And sometimes we don’t even have to help – it just happens naturally. In nature, even!
I can feel those sore calves coming on!
And did I mention scenes from Harry Potter Deathly Hallows were filmed here?
Roadschooling Claytons 