Fractals - Or Something Like That

The other day I was teaching both my sons some math and we were playing with equilateral triangles. We discussed the properties of equilateral triangles and played with different sizes of them that I had cut out of paper. I came across a side note in my guide saying that we were going to be discussing ten fractals the next lesson.
Frac-what? What the heck are fractals? And why are my 5 and 7 year olds learning about something that I know nothing about?

It turns out that fractals are geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which is a smaller size copy of the whole. And a tens fractal merely suggests 10 of the smaller = one of the larger. Well, it is way more complex than that, but for our introduction to fractals it was simple (thank goodness!)

The 3 of us made ten 10-fractals with equilateral triangles. Then we glued those all together to make one big fractal to show how 10 of these triangles with 10 triangles in them equals 100. Then, we were supposed to make 10 of the ten 10-fractals and glue those together to make one monstrous fractal, which shows how ten 10's are 100, and ten 100's are 1000 or that ten ten 10's are 1000. This process is way to monotonous with 2 boys who don't know how to switch off their imaginations to perform the tedious processes of life and 1 ADD mom who is easily distracted and has difficulty staying on task for more than a few minutes. So we just did one of the 100 triangles.

For the 1000 triangle we just used our imaginations, since those run rampant all the time anyways.