Beacon Lesson Plan Library
Geometry: Tessellations
Kathy Peters
Bay District Schools
Description
Students apply knowledge of reflections, rotations, and translations in creating a tessellation.
Standards
Florida Sunshine State Standards
MA.C.2.2.1
The student understands the concepts of spatial relationships, symmetry, reflections, congruency, and similarity.
MA.C.2.2.2
The student predicts, illustrates, and verifies which figures could result from a flip, slide, or turn of a given figure.
Florida Process Standards
Information Managers
01 Florida students locate, comprehend, interpret, evaluate, maintain, and apply information, concepts, and ideas found in literature, the arts, symbols, recordings, video and other graphic displays, and computer files in order to perform tasks and/or for enjoyment.
Numeric Problem Solvers
03 Florida students use numeric operations and concepts to describe, analyze, communicate, synthesize numeric data, and to identify and solve problems.
Critical and Creative Thinkers
04 Florida students use creative thinking skills to generate new ideas, make the best decision, recognize and solve problems through reasoning, interpret symbolic data, and develop efficient techniques for lifelong learning.
Materials
-Software such as TesselMania! Deluxe CD
-Macintosh Computer, System 7.1 or later
-Microsoft Windows, 486 or higher
Preparations
1. Instructor should be fully familiar and comfortable with the software, TesselMania.
2. Copy student handouts that accompany Lessons 1, 2, 3 of software package materials.
3. Prepare assessment tool #2.
Procedures
1. Introduce and review geometric terms: plane figures, polygons, symmetry, rotations, translations, and glide reflections.
2. Introduce tessellations to the entire class using a program like TesselMania! computer program. Through the on-line About Tessellations book, students will be given a solid background in tessellations and how to use the TesselMania! Deluxe CD.
3. Complete Lessons 1, 2, and 3 outlined in the teacher`s guide of TesselMania. Student handouts are in the back of the manual. These lessons are teacher-directed and are independent of the computer. The purpose of the lessons is to give the students hands-on experiences with translations, midpoint and vertex rotations, and glide reflections.
4. Have students work through each of the options of the computer program: solving tessellation puzzles, creating new tessellations, and making a project or gift from a tessellation.
5. Complete assessment activities.
Assessments
In student product look for the following characteristics of geometric figures: symmetry, congruence, reflections, rotations, and translations.
Also check for the use of flips, slides, and turns (reflections, translations, and rotations.)
Extensions
If you do not have the software, TesselMania, you might go to the website in the Web Link or search for other sites that allow your students opportunities to build their own tessellations.
Web Links
Web supplement for Geometry: Tessellations Tessellations Tutorials
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