This is part of the Math Picture Book series.

I rounded the corner at Barns & Noble one day and and this beautiful math picture book looked me in the eyes.

I just couldn’t resist buying Perfect Square by Michael Hall!

And what a treat it was!

It’s inspiration for math crafts, playing with color and patterns and talking about shapes – all in one neat little package!

A happy little perfect square gets cut, torn and shredded over the course of a week. But this optimistic shape uses the “abuse” to make itself into new and fun things each time.

Construction paper and scissors…

I made a bunch of squares from construction paper to start. With each page, I replicated the images.

One day the square gets cut into two triangles and crumpled up. So it makes itself into a mountain. This one was fairly easy.

Another day it was shattered, so it made itself into a bridge. The shattering resulted in 24 pieces – each a triangle or trapezoid. It was especially hard to do, so I’m sharing a picture of the bridge in this math picture book.

Another day, Perfect Square was cut into ribbons with crinkle shears and makes itself into a river. Long thin “mostly” rectangles were fun to do when I found my old scrapbooking scissors.

Are you ready to play?

I had a great time cutting each shape and seeing how I could replicate the images in the math picture book, Perfect Square. Some were easy, some were hard.

What can you do? What can your kids do? I’ll bet their creative minds go all over the place!

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• Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland
• Finding Patterns in a Lokta Paper Blank Book
• Perimeter and Area of Mommy’s Necklace