My class and I have been exploring patterns. I used an idea from Traditional Tales with a Mathematical Twist by Vince Wright as my initial inspiration.
Do you know the story of The Princess and the Pea? I told this to my class and changed the ending just slightly by having the Princess complain bitterly about the plain bedlinen as well as the pea. She was happy to marry the Prince as long as the pea was ditched and some nice quilts appeared for her bed.
Next we looked at a knitted blanket that had a repeated pattern and spent some time making patterns with some knitted squares that I had made. Each square was made up of two different coloured triangles. The inspiration for this came from Pat Ashforth and her knitted designs.
In the next session we moved on to making some patterns with the same type of square using our Promethean whiteboard. I created a page with a grid and made a divided square, set it’s properties to drag a copy and restricted it’s rotation to 90 degree turns so that we could start with one square and add to it. I set the snap to grid property on the grid to make things nice and easy.
We explored the number of different shapes that could be made with two and three divided squares.
The next step was to look at making three different designs with four divided squares. The children did this on a gridded page and coloured them in. Once we had done that we moved on to repeating this design on a four by four grid by sliding or rotating our original design and adding colour again.
I collected all the designs and scanned the two by two grid and the accompanying four by four grid and added these to a Powerpoint presentation. Each design took up two slides to show the development of the pattern as it was repeated. Using the format background tool I tiled the four by four grid to show how each design would look when it was repeated some more. Much easier than lots of repeated colouring in! As well as saving the Powerpoint presentation I saved each slide as an image so that I could explore some online tools.
I played with Animoto for the first time and used some of the designs.
It was easy to use and I am very happy with the end result.
We are also exploring this great online site from the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. There is lots to look at, read and a quilt designing game as well.