Math and Art Club Tessellation Projects

Over the past few weeks I'd been running a Math/Art club on Tuesdays for a small group of third and fourth graders at my school, and we just finished this past week.  Our focus was on tessellations/motion geometry, and we had a blast!

I first learned about creating tessellations from our art teacher, who did an art enrichment period for a few weeks for each grade level every year.  When that ended, she and I taught it together after-school one year, and when that sort of collaboration for after school clubs was discontinued, she was happy to let me take it over.  I'm just glad our school has had the funding to do it the past 2 years after a couple years of no clubs!

For our club we start out looking at examples and definitions for slides/translations, rotations/turns, and reflections/flips.  Then comes the art!

First we cut and paste tiles:

Then we traced tiles:

Next we created original tiles to trace:










And finally we did some freehand drawing:  

The kids (and I) had a lot of fun!  It was my first year doing this with third graders (usually I reserve it for my own fourth graders) but most of the third graders felt successful and proud of their masterpieces too. 

If you're interested, I have complete directions for these projects available in my TPT store here: Tessellation Lesson Plans.  I hope clubs are funded again next year!