Tessellations

M.C. Escher, Eat Your Heart Out

5th Grade's Tessellation Sensation!

If you've seen a handful of my blog posts, you already know that I love teaching cross curricular lessons and this one is no exception!  My 5th graders are learning about tessellations in math and naturally I jumped at the chance to teach them about M.C. Escher and his ability to make math visually beautiful!  I started by showing them this short video on YouTube:

We talked about what we saw and how many of the things we saw were familiar to us and where we saw them.  A few kids pointed out that I had shown some of M.C. Escher's work when we talked about Optical Illusions (I love when they retain that info!).  We talked about the complexity and simplicity of tessellations and I assured them that we would start off simple.  I made them a brief demo video of how we would create the tessellations (they're just getting too big to huddle around me and try to watch my live demos-so for something like this, I like to make videos).

This is the demonstration video

Once you've created your tessellating shape...transform it!

Trace and repeat to fill paper!  Color as you wish!

The kids got to work and made some amazing things.  So creative!

I didn't get a lot of "finished" photos from this lesson- I got busy (imagine that) but here is what I did capture:

Crazy Faces!

Businessman

Monsters

Horned Monsters

"Parachute Kitty"