The Birthday Bearapotamus

This is a description of a polygonoid named The Birthday Bearapotamus. His head is a hexagon colored blue with black dots. It has one corner sticking straight up. On the left side of the point is a triangular hat that says “Happy Birthday” on it. It has tassels on its point. Color it orange. Its eye is at the same level as the top corner of the right edge of the hexagon. The nose is on the same corner. The mouth is about a third way down the right edge of the hexagon. To the left of the head, line up two more hexagons for the body.

Put a rhombus so that the long side is horizontal. The short side goes down the crack between the body hexagons. It will fit perfectly. Do the same with a rhombus on the bottom. Outline this. This is the body. Along the left edge of the head, make a line half a centimeter to the left for a collar. For the tie, go a bit up from the bottom of the head, go diagonally up from the head, diagonally down two centimeters, and backwards diagonally to the body. Color the tie with orange and brown stripes.” Now draw a curving line from the left of the top corner of the body to the bottom, a bit farther than one centimeter from the corner. The part on the right is the shirt and it is yellow. Now make six buttons down the bottom edge of the shirt. On the shirt draw six small rhombuses that are green with green dots in between. The pants are green and black stripes and the pocket with the red and white cross hatches. At the back of the pants, he has a tail shaped like a rhombus. The arm starts at the tie and ends at the middle of the shirt. The leg starts at the edge of the pants. On the arm and leg there are little green triangles at the bottom. The arm and leg and its tail are blue. We hope you liked making our polygonoid.

The students at Escondido school did a pretty good job of following our description. The hat is the right size and shape. The tie is the right colors and the tail is also the right color. They also got the spots on the head right.

Most of the colors we told about they outlined instead of coloring solid. That is because we didn’t tell them to color it in. The hat is in the wrong place because we did not tell them where to put it. We were not clear where to put the pants either. The body is not the right shape. That is probably because we didn’t tell them which way to put hexagons. We also forgot to tell them to put paper the right way. They did a pretty good job recreating our polygonoid.