fibonacci

 It's just fun to say: Fibonacci. Never mind that it's all about a fun sequence of numbers to figure out:  0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5....0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55, and on and on - it's also all about spirals, making spirals, finding spirals, seeing these numbers repeated everywhere in nature...it's a brilliant way for someone like me to get completely geeked out about math.  How come I didn't know about it until I was in my thirties?? I suppose it could have been that I wasn't really paying attention, but you'd think I'd remember something like that.

We've played with Fibonacci before (there is a funny book about him from the library, called Blockhead) and looked for the numbers in nature, but this week we looked at Vi Hart's video on spirals. We are loving Vi Hart right now. So of course we had to play some more*...

 

*keeping it real: While Ani loved the idea of looking for spirals all over the house, she quickly grew SUPER frustrated trying to trace them out on a pine cone (a la Vi Hart) - which I found a little challenging too - and didn't even WANT to try to draw one.  She yelled about it a whole bunch.  We let it go.  Eliza drew a cool spiral, after figuring out the numbers on graph paper, and days later I managed to coax Ani, with a piece of cheese and a few games of Nim, into figuring out some of the sequence and talking me through drawing it out on graph paper, and then she wandered off to do something with the rest of the beans while I totally entertained myself by lining up the different colored beans in their boxes: 1,1,2,3,5,8...well, that's as far as I got, 'cause that's already a lot of beans!