Lantern Designs

We wanted to design little lanterns for our Matariki night. We have been learning about kowhaiwhai and tukutuku patterns and the beautiful geometry behind this artwork.

We explored so many patterns and the children described what they saw. Some saw fish, arrows, curls, ferns etc. Then we learnt the meanings of some of the more famous patterns. Most people loved patiki (flounder).

Then we learnt about 'translation' as a mathematical word to describe how a shape or pattern moves.
We all got a little game from Mrs Walker and played it with our thinking partner, we had to translate each shape in our game and explain it to our partner, but they were not allowed to look, they had to try to make it from our description.

Later Mrs Walker taught us about rotation, and we were able to link this to our learning about clocks, 1/4 and 1/2 turns, anticlockwise and clockwise.
We added these moves to our game.

Then we learnt about reflection, we are so good at the game now and everyone understands and can use this language.

We made patterns of our own on our lanterns.

Jacob and Marley noticed that in the game sometimes you can't really tell if a shape has been translated or rotated because it looks the same anyway. We wondered why this was so that will be our next investigation.