This unit begins by looking first at the relationship of mathematics and architecture (environment) through the explicit use of the senses. Students must develop their ability to use their senses to perceive everything that surrounds them and to provide them with the needed language to express what they see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. This skill is essential for them to better describe, explore, and pay attention to details. Thus, the students look at an object such as a building, a work of art, or sculptural piece and describe it in terms of color, form and light. Students touch different building materials - coarse to fine textures, sharp to smooth, etc.; or as in vibrations. They will explore and expand their vocabulary and then sense sound by listening to chimes, music compositions, environmental sounds in relation to a structure. Students explore the sense of smell as we study the vent for the cafeteria system. Why is it that smells travel to certain spaces and not others? They will experience smell words such as pungent, penetrating, biting, stimulating, - the rose garden, the orchard, the highway, or the rain. The sense of taste is explored in the context of foods and then extended to describe objects or structures that cannot be tasted as in bitter to sweet, sharp to mild, inviting or repulsive.
All of these descriptors have some degree of intensity, repetition, fractions, and flow for mathematical assessment yet all can be experienced for their appropriate beauty and placed within a culture or historical period. Therefore, when studying some building materials (e.g. adobe) we look at the cultures and historical period or periods when it was most prominent.
As part of the third grade curriculum in the New Haven Public Schools, students' work through a hands-on unit having to do with rocks and minerals. Students look at the similarities and differences between rocks and minerals. Some of the key concepts that children explore throughout that unit are how different rocks have different properties, how minerals are composed of only one substance, that minerals differ in color, textures, hardness, etc, and how these properties of rocks and minerals determine how they are used.
Through the unit, we expand on the use of rocks and minerals as building materials and, for example, compare the use of building materials and the rational of, design and form of artisans during the Arts and Crafts Movement to Post-Modern architects and crafts. These two periods are chosen specifically because of my interest in those periods and because of the clear differences among them. Given the diverse make up of the cultures represented in the classroom, we explore some cultural similarities and differences in the design and material use of some of the most representative architects and artisans.
The topic at hand will allow for many activities related to the steps of building a structure from the concepts or blueprints to the final building. The parallelism between the writing process and building a structure can be explored and extended to the Writer's Workshop.
Through the different activities we would explore different building materials, their environmental factors that affect form and design, basic mathematical principles involved from the concept stage to the final structure, highlights of the language of architecture, and the how and why of cultural differences in architecture around the world.
