Tal, my seven year old son, found one of those square and protractor sets at the grocery store and wanted to buy it, so we did. He and Imogen, my six year old daughter, played racing cars with the sets squares for a while, then Tal asked me what the markings on the protractor were for, so we talked about cirlces and degrees and I showed him how to measure angles. Then we went around the house looking for angles to measure. Imogen followed with the racing cars and parked her 90° car in the corners to see if it would fit.

Then Tal went off and drew triangles with one of the racing cars/set squares and came back totally excited because he found that all the angles in a triangle add up to 180°. He drew LOTS of triangles and they STILL added up to 180° "Way cool Mum!"

Then somehow we got on to finding the area of a triangle, and then he asked how you'd do that with a circle. So I gave him the formula and we talked about pi for a while, and he wanted to know who had first worked it out.

We looked it up on the internet and found a neat site that had about a dozen people who had worked out pi in various times and places. There were a couple of medieval Arabic chaps that he was interested in so we googled them. One of the sites was in english and arabic, which Tal thought was neat, so we searched for some other sites that had arabic script and found an awesome site with example of beautiful arabic calligraphy.

So, there we were at 6:30 pm, no dinner made, no laundry done, sitting on the floor with pots of paints and brushes trying our hand at calligraphy.

Laundry's still not done and we had PBJs for dinner but I have some lovely artwork on my walls:)

Becca

History of Pi

Islamic Calligraphy

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