Art Attack at Brownies

I took all of my fabric along to Brownies tonight for a 20 minute Art Attack Challenge. The girls got themselves into three groups and came up with two horses and a pumpkin as their creations. The group who created the first of the images below were declared the winners and we were really impressed with the creativity and teamwork demonstrated by this group who consisted of our youngest Brownies. I now have the much more time consuming and difficult challenge of sorting all the bits and bobs out again!

Geometrical Quilts

I’ve had this book for a long time having picked it up from a Tarquin stall at a Maths teacher training day some years ago. It was actually the only useful thing I picked up that day but that’s another story.

I love this book although I have never actually made a quilt from it. It’s full of beautiful designs and templates as well as inspiration for Maths lessons. I used two of the designs a few years ago in a Year 9 lesson revising ratio and proportion. Specifically I used the Fibonacci Series and Sierpinski’s Triangle quilts, which made for an interesting lesson for me if not the girls! ‘m often a little over-ambitious with my observed lessons!

Anyway, this book also features such delights as Penrose tiling, an Archimedian Spiral, the Lutes of Pythagoras and Von Koch’s Snowflake. There are so many ways to use them alongside lessons on tessellations, angles, fractals and rotational symmetry, as well as the ratio and proportion that I chose to use them for. One of these days I’m going to get the girls to recreate some of the designs using coloured paper to make amazing displays for room 16. This Maths and Crafting combination is a fascinating and powerful one. Honestly!