Shapes and patterns with Quilting Math: Make math a challenging, hands-on art activity!

Designing Squares

As your students create their own dynamic and colorful quilt squares, they will build on important geometry concepts. Discuss with your students the way quilt designers combine familiar elements from their lives with ideas from their own imaginations to create new patterns. Give each student a copy of the grid pattern Reproducible, opposite. Talk about shapes that might make interesting patterns. While children are working, circulate through the room and encourage them to talk to you about their design process. Invite them to show you what elements of quilt design, such as symmetry color, and balance, they are incorporating into their designs. When they are finished, display the squares individually or use them to make a collaborative quilt!

Making a Collaborative Album Quilt

With an album quilt, each square is unique. Make a paper album quilt that will celebrate the uniqueness of your class! Ask students to use their square designs as a pattern for their final quilt squares. Each student will trace the various colored shapes that make up his or her pattern onto brightly colored construction paper. When all of the pieces have been created, the child will assemble them to match the pattern from the reproducible and glue them in place on a piece of construction paper. After the individual blocks are completed, introduce the method of using strips to outline each square. Cut strips of paper (2-inches wide and as long as your finished square). Paste the blocks between the strips, and then add a contrasting border to complete the project. Your students will be amazed at the beauty and complexity of your class album quilt.

Color Tile Patterns

Tiling with colored manipulatives is a great way to explore geometry concepts such as symmetry, adjacency, and shape. Your students can use colored tiles, rainbow cubes, or one-inch squares of construction paper to make tile patterns. Model a basic AB pattern with the tiles. After completing one row of five or six tiles, continue the pattern on the next two rows. Ask students what they see. Invite them to notice the resulting diagonal and vertical patterns. Then ask students to work in pairs or groups on their own tile patterns, first with two colors, and then extending, as they feel comfortable, to three and four colors. Challenge children to create patterns with colors that radiate out from the center, (see the illustration at left.) Encourage them to explore other combinations. They'll enjoy and learn from replicating eath other's patterns and inventing new ones!

-- Adapted with permission from Quilting Activities Across the Curriculum, by Wendy Buchberg (Scholastic Professional Books, 1996). To order, call 1-800-SCHOLASTIC.