Ornamental Polygons

In math, we wrote used the properties of polygons to write polygon riddles and one day after school, McKenzie and Jaden came up with the idea to make them into ornaments for a holiday tree on our classroom door. Since it was their idea, they designed and created the trees, the snow,  the sign, and the name on the sign ("Ornamental Polygons"). When it was time to actually hang the ornaments, Mariah and Bailey came up with the idea to use yarn and actually hang them on the tree, so they took over hanging all the ornaments. Mariah also had the idea for the stars on top of the trees, so she made those as well.

For the ornaments, we wrote the riddles inside and the shape of the ornament is supposed to be the answer to the riddle. Some of the polygons some of us chose were really difficult to draw--especially the polygons with multiple pairs of parallel sides!

Polygon Art, Polygon Posters, and Transformation Art

During math stations lately, a couple of choices have revolved around polygons: polygon art, polygon posters, and transformation art.

For the polygon art, students followed this rubrichttp://mathforthemiddle.com/Documents/Polygon%20Art.pdf, to create either an abstract picture or a recognizable picture. While we'll add more, here are some examples of a students who used at least one of the following polygons to create their pictures.

See if you can find the following polygons in each artwork below:

Brooke's polygon art

* triangle
*quadrilateral
* pentagon

* hexagon

* heptagon

* octagon

* nonagon

* decagon

Alex's polygon art

John's polygon art

      

For the polygon posters, students sectioned off their poster into four categories: polygons, non-polygons, concave polygons, and convex polygons. Then they drew several examples of each and wrote explanations to describe each kind. Check out a few examples below:

For the transformation art, students cut out and designed their own polygon on an index card; then they used their polygon to make various polygon transformations: translations, reflections, and rotations.