Strategy 3- Math, middle grades

Title your post:  Strategy 3- Math, middle grades 

Your Name: Mandy Jennings

 Name of Strategy: Tessellation Craze (Art project)

Source (Where did this come from?): Hotchalk’s Lesson Plan Page 

Link to the Strategy: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/MathArtMakingTessellations56.htm

Give a thorough description of the strategy and how it will be implemented. This should be a summary of the strategy according to the original source: The teacher will show their students a tessellation and ask them if they know what it is. The teacher will explain what a tessellation is and how it is made using the textbook and other pieces of artwork to illustrate certain ideas. After discussing all required knowledge, the students will be asked to design their own tessellation to be displayed as artwork.

Explain what part of the standard course of study is addressed by this activity. Grade 6- Objective 3.03- Transforms figures in the coordinate plane and describes transformations. Unlike many general strategies, his particular strategy has one specific objective that it was designed to address. Having students create their own artwork is a good way to have them show their understanding of geometric tessellations. In addition to the artwork, I would have the students create a “key” to their artwork, telling what transformations were used in creating their tessellation and how the figures were manipulated to fit together.  

Explain why you think this strategy will work. How does the strategy help your students learn? This strategy creates a hand-on approach to learning tessellations. Tessellations and transformation are full of mathematical jargon that may be hard to learn and remember if they are only presented in lecture format. Creating a tessellation will allow the students to physically manipulate a piece of paper to fulfill the terms that they are learning from class. The physical manipulative, along with having to provide an explanation of their actions, should help the students to internalize the information that they have learned. As an added bonus, it allows the students to create a piece of artwork that they can be proud. As tessellations are presented to the class, students could be asked to interpret the drawing made by other students, identifying transformations that they see that they may or may not have used in their own drawings.