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Right Start Math Cotter Fractals
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We are working through Right Start Level B. Could any of you who have been through this level tell me if you did the Cotter Fractal, and if so if it is worth the time involved in cutting out all of those triangles. We are not a part of a co-op as it recommends it being a group activity. We started it but I just am really doubting if it is worth our time. I would love some guidance.
We (me and 2dc) did it to a smaller scale. I printed the tiny triangles on white paper and the bigger triangles on blue paper and then we pasted 10 of the blue triangles on a large white poster board cut into a triangle shape. Then I showed them the picture in the teacher’s book of what it would look like if we made 10 of those large posterboard triangle “Cotter Fractals”.
When I cut my white trangles, I think I used my paper cutter to cut many out at one time quickly. The kids pasted them. Well, we split the 10 blue triangles up between us to paste and it did not take that long.
I didn’t do it with my older 2 (together) – might for the others, but doubt it.
I have heard of someone that made the 10 triangle…. then photocopied 9 times – then made the 100 triange from them… then photocopied that 9 times…. to make the 1000 triangle….
We started it but ran out of time so we put part of it on the wall and then imagined what it would have been like. I don’t feel like we missed anything.
My 7yo son and I did it in full and I am SO glad we did! We took our time. I prepped ahead of time with all of the photocopies. We spent one day cutting out the small triangles on blue cardstock, and I did the rest on my own. I cut out all of the larger triangles on regular white copy paper. We spent 3 days gluing the small triangles to the larger one, then spent another day taping all of the triangles to the wall in our basement (we didn’t adhere the whole thing to paper, just to the wall). All the while I kept wondering if we were wasting our time, but something kept me doing it.
I was very intimidated by this when I first saw it. I thought long and hard about skipping it because I felt it would take way too much time. In the end, we did take a week to do it. But I cannot count how many times my son said, “Mom, this is FUN!” and don’t we all long to hear our kids say that! He said it repeatedly. And the visual really did help him. It’s still up on our basement wall from when we completed it on Monday of this week.
If you are looking to be encouraged, please hear that from me! It was not intuitive to me but I am so glad we did it.
So in the directions for this, it says to have a background paper of 72″ high by 84″ wide. Cannot find anything near that… Closest I can find is 60″ wide, but it’s like $56 plus shipping for 1 roll. Can’t do that. Yikes! So anyone else who did this project, what did you do? I don’t have wall space or floor space to do it like that, and I was really hoping to be able to take it to our end-of-year co-op expo to show it off (though I suppose just a picture would be fine, if I had to). Ideas? My dd is really excited to do this project, so I really don’t want to skip it. (Especially since we have almost all of the thousand tiny triangles cut out already……. LOL)
Coutd you contact a newspaper to see if you could get an endroll? Otherwise I’d just tape things together as I go.
We skipped it too
We used the poster board at $.50 each. We did only one. It was not quite long enough, so the bottom is hanging down like fringe, taped to the bottom of the posterboard. Since the posterboard is white and the wall is white, it looked okay. I guess you could piece together pieces of posterboard to make it the right size, but I did not want to go to all that trouble. We did only one of the large posterboards instead of 10. But it would work the same way on each.
Ok ladies I have a solution, though I’m probably way too late for most of you, I thought I would post it anyhow for any newcomers. We also scaled ours back to the size of a sheet of posterboard like Wings2fly said. But instead of cutting we used triangular stickers (repositionable) that we bought at Amazon for I think 15.00. We bought two packages and it they were about $7 a pkg. Here is the link:
Worked like a charm! My husband designed 10 hundreds triangles and we just filled in every other triangle with the negative spaces remaining white. Then we arranged them on a poster board and voila! A reasonable size fractal for the homeschooling mom that doesn’t want to “live” in a schoolroom:) Email me if you’d like a photo! swearingencj@hotmail.com
We are finishing up Level A (edition 2) and were introduced to the Cotter Fractals and 1000’s. The week after our 1000’s lessons was my son’s 2000th day. (I don’t know where I got this idea, but your 2000th day is about 10 days before you are 5 1/2 years old). To mark this ‘special day’ we made 2 1000 triangles. I copied the 10’s triangles and cut them out. DS and I pasted them on coloured craft paper to make 100’s and then used painters tape to put them on the wall.
This took up much less space than needed for the lessons in Level B. DS really enjoyed the activity and the visual of how old he was.
So looking at the Level B lessons, we will do something with the triangles – I saved the ones we made. I can’t imagine all the cutting and pasting as directed, but it really was fun, and worthwhile, so I wouldn’t skip it completely.
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