Play-Doh Solids

(The lessons from this chapter are not coming out in the proper order, but hopefully they can still be useful independently…)

What better way to gauge how well your students understand solids than by PLAY-DOH! This was tons of fun.

Each team got one tub of Play-Doh, some fishing string (to cut), and a plastic knife. The Play-Doh had to rotate hands every challenge. The challenges were on Powerpoint, one challenge per slide.

First slide, person #1: in 3 minutes, build your best… tetrahedron. GO!

At the end of the 3 minutes, everyone has to throw their hands in the air and wave ’em around like you just don’t care!… or just hold them there. I collect all the CORRECT tetrahedrons and then judge the BEST ones for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

The challenges/slides go something like this:

• build your best tetrahedron
• octahedron
• dodecahedron
• model of what the following net will build:
  
• Regular pentagonal prism
• Polyhedron whose cross-section is a triangle
• model of what the following net will build:
  

You can add or subtract what you like to the slides and to the time allotted for building.

To consider for next year: Add a drawing section and have them next DRAW THE NETS to a given solid.