Easter Egg Box Project

I don't remember a huge amount about maths lessons when I was at school. I remember enjoying the SMP system in year 7 where you worked through lots of little books and essentially taught yourself. I really liked that. I didn't like the GCSE coursework where you had to count words in sentences and then work out the standard deviation of the sentence lengths. As a lover of literature I despaired to see To Kill A Mockingbird reduced to such soul-destroying analysis.

However, some lessons did capture my imagination and I remember particularly enjoying a series of lessons where we had to design an easter egg box. Luckily for me, I was allowed to work with my hugely talented best friend who was both a mathematical high achiever and ridiculously creative. She came up with the idea of designing a net that looked like a hen's head.

It was pretty impressive. It consisted of an octagonal prism and a cone all in one net, which we decorated to look like a hen's head and beak. I've searched on the internet for something similar and this is the closest image I can get to it, but it doesn't really do it justice.......

So I wonder what our y7s and y8s will come up with when we give them the same project in a week or so's time.

Here are the resources on the TES: http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Design-Your-Own-Easter-Egg-Box-Project-6323990/

If you are looking for a project to do before easter, I think it should be a good one. It wasn't difficult to put together and so far I think it's ticking all the boxes (ho, ho! I love a good pun)

Which boxes has it ticked? Well it......

*hasn't taken long to plan
*helps to deliver quite a lot of national curriculum content
*allows students to be creative
*has a cross-curricular element
*gives us the chance to assess objectives without testing students to death
*shows how maths applies to real life situations
*AND is open-ended enough for all students from level 3 to level 8.

The resources on the TES include a powerpoint  and a student assessment sheet. I haven't uploaded the nets that we are going to use because we've taken most of them from www.senteacher.org. We also drew some ourselves on sqaured paper, so that the level 2/3 students can count squares.

If we get any particularly impressive designs, I'll post them up on the blog too.