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Shaping young minds
By PAULETTE LASH RITCHIE © St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2001 CITRUS SPRINGS -- Start with a square. Fold it. Bisect the plane. Fold it again. And again. Make rectangles, triangles, and smaller squares. Learn geometry. Alice Wagner's Citrus Springs Middle School classroom is full of colorful folded paper and cardboard. She teaches regular and advanced math and geometry and likes to use origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, to illustrate math concepts. "I love hands-on math, and in order to motivate the kids you have to do something different. With origami you can teach any geometry concept," she said. "You can even teach proofs." Her students just keep folding and talking about the shapes they are making, she said. "They love taking their shapes home and showing them to their friends," Wagner said. "They learn the vocabulary of geometry from this." The method has proved to be so popular with her students that Wagner plans to start an after-school math class once a week so those students can do the origami math. She has been doing it during Falcon Focus, a 15-minute class period four days a week attached to lunch, when teachers can do something extra with students that is not on the curriculum. Origami is not the only hands-on technique Wagner, 44, uses in her classroom. In her geometry class, she said, she and her students discussed the school courtyard. It needed more practical uses, they thought. "So we decided to make a scale model of the courtyard," Wagner said. The students had to draw it to scale using the metric system. They want to present it to the school and perhaps have a contest about what to add to the courtyard. Wagner's students had a lot of fun with their teacher's lesson for learning volume. Her seventh-graders had to construct cereal boxes and figure the volumes and surface areas of them. "They actually did scale drawings of the boxes," Wagner said. The students were also very imaginative with their boxes, naming their imaginary cereals such things as Lightning Babies and Bowl Full of Teddies. One student, Carly Lewis, created Lightning Loops, "the cereal that storms," which she priced at $2.99. "Hey, kids," her box read, "this cereal has calcium! Take this quiz to test your calcium smarts!" She even included a Lightning Loops cereal bowl offer, at $2.50 per bowl. Sean Scriven came up with a mother's nightmare, Sugar Rush -- Crispy Chunks of Sugar and Oats. The cereal was priced at only 99 cents, but had an astonishing 100 grams of sugar in each serving. Jessica Jones' Sour Puffs were priced at $1.99. The puffs in her imaginary breakfast were blueberry bursts, lemonade loca, banana bliss, sour berry cherry and mystery flavors. Her cereal had a contest to name the mystery puff and winners collected points to win prizes (20 points for a small prize). Jessica wanted to be sure there was no confusion about how to eat the cold cereal, so she included directions on her box. "Pour cereal in bowl and add milk or fruits. Do not heat milk."
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