Fun with Parchment Paper

Eating gluten-free can be expensive, especially when it comes to bread products.  Hamburger-bun molds exist for baking your own, but not at your local retail store.  That's why I use parchment paper to make my own:  Take a rectangular strip of paper and tape it around into a ring.  Voila, a hamburger bun mold!  (If you're extra nerdy, like me, measure the diameter of the burger and multiply by pi to get the length of the paper strip to use.)

But the fun doesn't end there!  

This weekend, after making these rings to bake buns, I was reminded of Mobius Strips.  Since SpiderGirl wanted to study more "surface math," I asked her to notice how many surfaces the ring had.  She observed that it had two:  an inside and an outside.  I "colour" the inside, and I must lift the pen to "colour" the outside.  As well, they are closed surfaces so there is a place to put the bun dough.

But what if we give it a twist?

Now, it still looks like it has two surfaces.  However, when I begin to colour, it is apparent to SpiderGirl that there is only one surface!  Weird!  AND... now, where do we put the dough?  If we tried to fill it, we would either have NO BUN!  OR we would have an INFINITE BUN!

We played with a few more.

two twists

 Two twists give a structure that again has two surfaces, but they are not closed.  More infinite buns!

three twists

After three twists, we found it too difficult to add more twists (for the length and material of strip).

SpiderGirl is finding these big concept math explorations a fun foil to the more mundane practice of multiplication tables.  Her ability to visualize geometric objects is challenged and there are no right or wrong answers.