Magic numbers for creative writing - and archiecture

Catching up on some pre-SETT newspaper reading, made even more a tricky task by the Guardian being only 20p with all these vouchers, I found this article on magic numbers, relating to the way The Core in Cornwall has been designed. Architects designed it using the magical sequence 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on, that was discovered by Leonardo da Pisa in the 13th century.

And in the classroom...
A couple of years ago I started my creative writing unit (reading and writing fairytales) with groups of S1 pupils in their sixth week of learning French. We used the gory original fairytales by Charles Perrault for inspiration (and great Flash versions of fairytales and poems from the Lire Créer site) and then set around co-writing two different stories as a whole class. The ideas came from the class, but they had to follow certain rules we found in the Perrault tales we had read before. One of these concepts was that of magical numbers, which I first came across while studying in my Fairytale course during my MA (yes, that's right, fairytales - very interesting indeed).

Until I read this Guardian article, though, I had very little appreciation of how these numbers can be translated into visuals, too.

That's all, really. The fairytale idea is well worth trying out. The boys love it (gore and hanged unclothed ladies in the dungeon) and the whole class get a great thrill from the amount of French they "know", when in fact it's merely a lesson in how close the English and French languages are.