The Laboratory

After yesterday's snowflake crafts it's a double whammy for Karen who gets her Christmas TREE craft on the calendar! This is a tree in the shape of a Sierpinski gasket - a fractal creation that has smaller and smaller patterns of triangles cut out until there is (theoretically) no area left but an infinite array of impossibly small triangles. This is just an approximation! Other tree news this year, which we'll pile in here as we're running out of days: There's no tree at Tate Britain, as they are remodelling the Atrium. After last year's stupendous LEGO tree at St Pancras, this year they have gone for a giant gold ribbon making up a cone shape, but no actual tree. To make up for that, here's the tree from the Rockefeller Center in New York, where they really know how to do this sort of thing:

It's the last week of term, so teachers are on the look-out for activities that are (a) educationally valuable, and (b) seasonally relevant. One of my favourites is to look at constructing snowflakes - depending on the group it can be something quite straighforward, or become incredibly intricate. Our friend Karen is both a Maths teacher and very good at knitting and crochet, and these are some of the many snowflake designs she has crocheted this year. If you want to make snowflakes online there are two very good websites: At  http://www.andrewt.net/snowflake/ by adjusting the pattern in the top left you can alter your snowflake on the right If paper-cutting is more your thing but you don't fancy clearing up the mess, a snowflake maker from  http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/ gives you loads of possibilities!