Assist young children in using lengths of string to measure body parts, furniture or other objects, and use these measurements to compare or contrast themselves to the dimensions of objects within your learning space. For example, measure every student’s arm or height or wrist, and create a statistical graph on the floor with the string. Arrange the strings side-by-side, parallel, in order of length, creating a bell-curve graph that demonstrates median, average and mean. Consider taping the strings to the ceiling with their photos attached.
Another example: Have each child use string to measure various body parts, then compare the length of the hand to his foot, the circumference of the head to that of the waist and neck, and the distance between the shoulders to that between the hips, teaching ratios and fractions.
Punch equidistant holes around the circumference of a circle or the perimeter of a rectangle or square. Give each elementary student different colors of yarn or embroidery floss, and have her divide the shape into various fractional parts such as one-half, one-third or two-fourths. Marking off two-fourths with string of one color and one-half with string of a second color helps a student see that the fractions are equal, for example.
Give elementary or middle school students a worksheet with math computations they need to solve. The solutions to the problems give the students the coordinates they need to create a piece of string art. If all answers are correct, the student creates a string art shape that is symmetrical and uniform. In a circle with 46 points, for example, the answer to the first eight problems are 1, 16, 32, 2, 17, 33, 3 and 18. Each answer rotates around the circle 16 points so that the student uses every point and the final answer returns you to the starting point at 1.
Use string art to draw geometric shapes and work with the properties of each shape. Kindergarteners through second-graders will use the numbered points to create shapes: Five points on a circle that sequence 1, 3, 5, 2, 4 and 1 create a five-pointed star inside the circle. On a page with dots, these students could map out line segments, angles, squares, rectangles, triangles, octagons and parallelograms using points designated by the teacher. Third- and fourth-grade students learn to map points on a coordinate plane to create shapes, lines, rays and line segments. You can use points and string art to help fourth- and fifth-grade students understand perimeter, angles within a shape, circumference, diameter, radii, proportion and how to divide irregular shapes like trapezoids into regular shapes to determine area.