Tessellations: Art and Math Teachers coming together

Last week was exploration week for the theme based around the Adventure Science Museum trip. Leslie Franklin the math teacher and I collaborated to teach the students about pattern and tessellations.

First we watched a video on how to create tessellations from crystal. This video was really well done and broke it down really well for the students.

Some of the students did a really great job with this assignment. Others didn't do so great. This is a difficult lesson to do with students with special needs, but you sometimes don't know what they are capable of until they try.

Monet Waterlilies

Hello all! While most of you are enjoying your summer vacations I continue to teach all summer long. (Needless to say I am very much looking forward to heading to Belmont for the TN Arts Academy for my "vacation.") Any who... This year our summer schedule has been redone and we are doing this quite differently. Each week the students enjoy field trips to all sorts of places such as the zoo, wave country, adventure science center and so forth. Each week is a theme based around the field trip for the week- and the teachers/ aid are teamed up and the students divided into 5 classes that are an hour and 5 minutes long instead of 10- 35 minute class periods. New classes are more life skills/ fun based such as cooking, gardening, swimming, art, ect.

This week the students went to the Waynesboro community pool which apparently is the awesomest pool with all kinds of slides and such, so this week is "water week." In art class we created Monet's Waterlilies and have also done some paper marbling with shaving cream. Check out the results.

 Monet's Waterlilies

Materials: Coffee filters, markers, a bucket of water, crayons, water colors, glue, green construction paper (lily pads) and scissors

Shaving Cream Paper Marbling

 

Paper Marbling using Shaving Cream and Liquid Watercolors (or food coloring)

After smoothing the shaving cream over a lunch tray we dribbled a few splashes of liquid water color on top (limiting the students to two colors!) The students then used the back end of paint brushes to make their line marbling patterns. A comb would also work for this step.

A piece of white drawing paper is laid over the shaving cream and gently massaged. When the paper is pulled off the pattern isn't visible yet.

Using Popsicle sticks we scrapped the shaving cream off the paper immediately after pulling the print and the design is magically revealed!

The completely scrapped paper!

The results were amazing!