Concentric Circles
Concentric circles are all around us, in things we make, like tin cans and in nature, inside trees. They are a type of parallel curve, you can learn more about parallel curves in our article about them.
For circles to be concentric, they must have a constant distance between them, which is the same as them having the same centre. In the image below, we can see some concentric circles on a grid.
What is special about concentric circles? What do they share?
“Share the same centre”
In one nursery setting, the children became very interested in drawing spirals and concentric circles. One day, the nursery practitioners laid out a collection of objects (shown below) which linked to concentric circles to see what the children would think. The children were excited and some of their comments are given below.
What makes what you see the same?
“Circles”
“Concentric circles”
“Look at that big circle”
“A big circle there”
Are they all the same?
“No they are different. They big, and that one little.”
“Different sizes”
“That one like a concentric circle because they little and big circles”
The children then began to draw concentric circles next to the objects they had seen. Some of their drawing is shown in the image below.
Identifying and drawing concentric circles is a great activity for children, and some of the other instances of children creating or finding concentric circles are shown in the images below. They particularly enjoyed finding the concentric circles in natural objects like slices of beetroot and sections of trees. Some of these cases are shown in the image below.
