Parallelograms

We started our Special Quadrilaterals Unit the other day, and parallelograms were our opening act. Last fall, I found large, 250 straw, $1 each bags of pretty colored straws, and I had an inkling that I could use them for geometry. My original idea was to use them later on for the 3D units when I was talking about edges and vertices and faces and such. BUT.

I was playing around with cutting off pairs of congruent straws and putting them together. I had extra resistors hanging around (resisting the trash can, ar ar ar), and I made this:

 that can be squished to this:

connected with this:

My vision is that they can keep bringing this to class, and we can continue to reinforce the properties, and they can MAYBE not mix up rectangle/rhombus/parallelogram/etc. properties.

Don't burst my bubble.

My coworker had the brilliant idea that then we could use spaghetti for the diagonal investigations.

This was their homework: