- Plan Lessons With -
This page has a few ideas for lesson plans that teachers can use with JOVO Click 'N Construct toys, organized from the easiest to the most challenging. Make sure to click on the links, to see the details for each age group. The detaied pages have much more descriptive examples, and pictures. The lesson plan ideas include ways to use them as math manipulatives, and for art projects.
Remember that these are computer generated images, just to give you an idea of what can be done, but they are not photographs of models made with Jovo. If you want to see what the models look like when made with the Jovo pieces, make sure you visit my Pictures Page
If you have a fun idea on how to use these in your lessons, and you would like to share, e-mail me and I will add it to the page if I can. Remember it doesn't need to be math-oriented. If you find uses in science, art, language etc. please share these with others!
Alex@JovoToys.com
For designing flat creations, feel free to use my triangle grid paper, square grid paper, and hexagonal grid paper, along with colors, markers or colored pencils.
Pre-Kindergarten - Click here for details on these lessons.
- Learn the names of the pieces we will be using - triangles, squares and pentagons.
- Sort pieces by color, ignoring the number of sides on each piece.
- Sort pieces by shape, ignoring the color of each piece.
- Sort pieces by both color and shape.
- Learn the names of some of the solid figures, like pyramid and prism.
- Arrange the pieces into patterns using shape, color and direction - such as red triangle, blue triangle, green pentagon, red triangle, blue triangle, green pentagon.
Kindergarten-2nd Grade - Click here for details on these lessons.
- Click pieces together to form winding flat ribbons. Use patterns for the shape and color of the ribbons.
- Click together a string of 6 squares that form a pattern e.g. red, blue, green, red, blue, green. Connect the two ends to make a repeating ring.
- Click together 6 squares in the shape of a cross. Connect the top and bottom of the cross to make a repeating ring, and then close the lids of the "box".
- Assemble 6 triangles in a flat circle to form a hexagon.
- Surround the ‘hexagon’ with squares and fill in the gaps with triangles to form a dodecagon.
- Make ‘hexagons’ and ‘dodecagons’ with color patterns, following a specific rule. Make different flat ‘rings’ using color patterns.
- Make other plane figures with various color patterns. Start by using just triangles, and then try with both triangles and squares.
- Make letters and numbers using squares and triangles. Find different ways of making the same letter.
- Make plane figures with just pentagons (there will be gaps between some pentagons), and see if you can form some symmetrical patterns.
- Create some simple 3D shapes such as pyramids, bipyramids and prisms. Try attaching pyramids to prisms, pyramids to pyramids and prisms to prisms in different ways. (see the math page for more info on these shapes)
- Create more simple shapes, such as cupolas and cupolas with pyramids or prisms attached. (see the math page for more info on these shapes)
- Using these simple shapes, try counting the faces. Figure out how to count without losing track of where you are!
3rd-5th Grade - Click here for details on these lessons.
- Explore patterns for tiling the plane. Find repeating sets of ‘tiles’ that can be used, and different ways they can be arranged.
- Find more tilings of the plane by using different shaped tiles. Build bigger tiles with unusual shapes by using multiple tiles with the same color.
- Explore the Platonic Solids - Identify how many faces, edges and corners each figure has. Make a table, and wonder if these numbers are just a coincidence.
- Examine the Archimedean Solids that can be made with Jovo - Identify how many faces, edges and corners each figure has. Notice the left-handed and right-handed snub polyhedra.
- Starting with a net of a figure and a picture of what it should look like, assemble that figure.
- Make the polyhedra using different coloring patterns, such as making an octahedron with two alternating colors. Make a dodecahedron using three, four or six colors. Try to find more than one way to use the same number of colors.
- Try drawing some of the polyhedra. Hold it in one hand and look at it carefully as you draw. Draw what you see, not the shapes you know are there.
- Try drawing a ‘landscape’ of several different polyhedra buildings. Compare drawings, and try to figure out which direction it was drawn from.
- Use strips of pieces to explore multiplication and division. Four groups of five squares is the same count as five groups of four squares (commutative property of multiplication).
- Use flat figures to work with fractions and percentages. How can you divide a hexagon figure into 2, 3, or 6 equal shares?
6th-8th Grade - Click here for details on these lessons.
- Study the Platonic Solids in more detail. What are the relationships between them?
- Study the Archimedean Solids. How are they related to the Platonic Solids?
- Learn about 2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold and 5-fold rotational symmetry. Which models have which symmetries?
- How are octahedra and tetrahedra related (face-angles)? What happens when you attach a tetrahedron to an octahedron?
- Explore the Johnson Solids. Figure out why some figures are not included (already listed as Platonic, Archimedean, Prism or Antiprism, or model is not convex).
- Which Johnson solids can be split into two or more smaller regular-faced polyhedra by cutting along a plane, and which ones cannot be subdivided?
- Explore non-convex polyhedra of various sorts.
9th-12th Grade - Click here for details on these lessons.
- Explore the metrical properties of solid figures. If they have a unit edge length, calculate their surface area and volume. Figure out how to determine dihedral angles.
- Measure the volumes of different solid figures using sand or rice. Start with a cube. If you assume these figures all have unit edge length, try to predict what the volumes should be, using the cube as your base.
- Try to figure out the coordines in 3D space for some of these figures (you can assume unit edge length). Use symmetry information to place them in a way that makes this job easier (for example, arange the octahedron so that each vertex lies on one of the axes (xy, yz or xz)).
- Explore toroidal polyhedra. How can you make figures that have "holes" through them? What properties can we look for that will lead to such figures?
College and beyond - Click here for details on these lessons.
- How can polyhedra tile 3D space? Obviously cubes will work by themselves to fill space. What other polyhedra (or combinations of polyhedra) can fill space?
- Study Infinite Repeating Polyhedra. What arrangements of polygons at a vertex can lead to such figures? Try creating similar figures using more than one kind of vertex.
Jump straight to Lessons for:
Pre-Kindergarten,
Kindergarten through 2nd,
3rd through 5th,
6th through 8th,
High School or
College and Beyond.
Jump straight to
Pictures of Models,
Mathematical Models,
Creative Models or
Lesson Planning,
Go back to the Jovo Toys Main Page
Or go buy some more Jovo Toys on the Ordering Page
Thanks to Robert Webb for his very cool "Stella" program. I have used it extensively to generate VRML files for my site. It is a great tool for rapid exploration of augmentations and excavations of polyhedra (among other things).
Thanks also to Melinda Green and Don Hatch for their excellent Tyler Web Application. This free web tool lets you do great flat designs with polygons in just about any arrangement.
All pages on this site were written in Microsoft's Notepad, using Microsoft Paint and IrfanView for image editing. For more details, see my Help Page
Link to this page as http://www.JovoToys.com/JovoLessons.html
