Face Painting

You want to make each of the 5 Platonic solids and colour the faces so that, in every case, no two faces which meet along an edge have the same colour.

Child's Play

A toy has a regular tetrahedron, a cube and a base with triangular and square hollows. If you fit a shape into the correct hollow a bell rings. How many times does the bell ring in a complete game?

Making Maths: Triangular Ball

Make a ball from triangles!

Redblue

Stage: 2 Challenge Level:

Why do this problem?

This activity is very good to have pupils explore some special properties of solid shapes. It is particularly good in that the solutions do not appear very obviously.

Possible approach

Introduce the pupils gradually to the recognition of what are vertices and what are edges. Most pupils will then be needing to handle the shapes unless they are gifted in visulaisation.

Key questions

Tell me about your shape.

What vertices have you used?

Possible extension

Extensions are included in the last part of the activity.

Possible support

Shapes made from pipe-cleaners and straws can be a useful aid.

Tangram. Addition & subtraction. Practical Activity. Regular polyhedra. Interactivities. Investigations. Working systematically. Visualising. Compound transformations. Networks/Graph Theory.

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