Tessellations: A Curated Lesson of Free Resources
Since I am focusing on math on my blog this month, I thought it would be fun to dive into some free resources on a beautiful math topic. This is designed as a lesson, where you can follow through the links and use them directly with your kids to teach about tessellations. I placed the article links at the top because I did not find any video’s that adequately covered what a tessellation is, so make sure you start at the top. I read through articles, watched video’s, and made sure links to printables worked before choosing the best of what I could find and linking here. I have also tried to limit resources to a reasonable number. (Nothing bothers me more giant lists that need intense whittling down before entering the realm of usefulness.)
Read
Some of the explanation in the following is a repeat of what was covered in the previous two links, however, there is a link at the bottom, Tessellation Artist, that takes you to a free program where your student can draw their own freehand tessellations. You can skip to the second link if your child understands the concepts and just want to explore the drawing program.
Look
You can click on any of these animal pictures to pull up a graphic of the image in tessellation.
Biography of MC Escher, an artist who was fascinated with tessellations. (This is in a playlist, I am only recommending the first video, and maybe the second if your student wants to learn a little more about Escher (it is a five minute BBC excerpt), I found the others both boring and confusing.)
Print & Do
Super Teacher Worksheets Tessellations
Draw a Tessellation on Tracing Paper
Watch and do:
A video for drawing a tessellation (requires basic drawing skills, although the concept could be used with younger kids to make geometric tessellations):
For serious artists:
If you have an art student you may want to watch this video, it is an interesting way you can make print tessellations. It does require some specific supplies, but I was so fascinated by the process I could not helping linking it.
If you want to try the above video, here are links to the supplies she mentions on Amazon. It will cost about $45.00 to get started, but if you have a budding artist who wants to try it, most of these supplies can be reused.
If you found this blog post helpful and would like to see more curated lessons, please leave a comment and let me know!