Students design quilt blocks by drawing contiguous geometric shapes on graph paper and shading or coloring them. As an extension, they transfer their design to cotton fabric and assemble a quilt block, which can be finished as a pot holder, or combined with other students' blocks to form a geometric wall hanging for the classroom. A field trip to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell enhances the historic aspect of the activity. They record their findings, using drawings and charts, and give a presentation to the class that includes their reasoning to justify their findings concerning shapes that may be impossible to form. This activity can be extended to include work with fractions and ratios by assigning unit values to different shapes.
Students can make their own tangram puzzles.
Connections with literature and other cultures can be made by exploring the historical background of the tangram puzzle. Examples of Student Learning Working in small groups, students make boxes from pieces of paper and explore relationships. They have available to them a myriad of materials and manipulatives, including grid paper for graphing and cutting, cubes or beans or rice or candy bits, graduated cylinders, tape, and scissors. Students try to find the box with the largest volume, and the smallest volume. As they work with the materials, students explore different relationships as they convince others that their box holds the most.