Amazing Geoboards!

The geoboard is pretty much my favorite manipulative--there is so much mathematics that can be addressed using this simple tool.


My newest student is a gifted 6-year-old and the first manipulative I introduced him to was the geoboard. He had used one before, but I assured him we would be doing activities with it unlike any he had done at school.

By the end of the first hour, he was happily finding the areas of squares on the geoboard, and NOT just squares of size 1, 4, 9, and 16!

(There are FOUR other squares whose areas are whole numbers.  Give it a try. Email me with your results.)

During the second hour we collected data about the areas of shapes classified by the number of boundary pegs and the number of interior pegs. Over time, we'll work our way to Pick's Formula. (A mathematical discussion is presented in Chapter 2 of Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations.)

By the end of the third hour my student had discovered a tessellation,

 but was more interested in creating more of his own designs.