Tessellations

In Moana, stage 6 and stage 7's maths strand focus is tessellations. Tessellations are shapes that can fit leaving no gaps and no overlapping. Tessellations are all around us.

There was this man who found out hundreds of ways to make different and his name was Mc Escher. Mc Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, Holland. By distorting different shapes he transformed them into animals. We were given the instructions to choose from a shape up the top. There was a T shape, a C shape an X shape and a plus shape. Once we had chosen our shape we had to find a way to fit them together by rotating them or sliding them or flipping them.When we have made enough  progress with our one shape we can move on to two or three shapes.

Tessellations are fun to do and really are a great brain strainer. Maybe you could make a tessellation of your own! Anyways see you in the next blog post.

Attributing images
The Horses
The Dinosaurs                   
The Lizards
The Doves
The People                             

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

On Tuesday, our school did a clean up in our Wainui community. First our class started by heading down to the beach with our buddy class. We ruled out a 100x100 meter square. We then tried to find as much rubbish as we could in that boundary. In the end we had HEAPS of rubbish, plastic, fabric and even honeycombs!

We took them to class and on our deck there were lots of bins all for specific findings. People got choose to pick a bin then to sit by it and do a tally chart. We calculated all the rubbish. I got cloth and to my surprise there was quite a lot of cloth. Plastic was the dominant one though as you could probably guess. We then had a little bit of morning tea and brain break. After all that the school went down to Hamanatua Stream. When we got there we all sat down and ate lunch.

Near the end of our Actions day we all had a play on the beach, then walked along the beach all the way to school again. When we got back to school we all gathered in the school hall and watched a slide show, showing what we had accomplished that day.