Friday, January 11, 2013

Geometric Patterns and Building Drums





Fourth Grade focus on Native American Studies have lead us in the direction of drum building this month and to begin we created these beautiful geometric designs to cover our drums.  Below you can see student work in progress and get an idea how we started these patterns with our rough draft drawings.  The patterns were plotted out on a paper folded to create a grid.  I demonstrated how to use the grid to create two different designs.  I demonstrated the diamond shape you see below and the simple triangle design that you see in the third example above.  Students then improvised a wide variety of geometric designs within their grids.   Once the practice sheet was completed to student satisfaction, we used the same folded paper grid on a larger sheet of brown craft paper.  Students outlined with marker and filled in traditional colors with art sticks, which are a colored pencil type crayon.  Students were encouraged, but not limited to using traditional colors:  red, golden yellow, brown, green, white, black, and red in their designs.
This lesson opened may interesting connections to geometry in math and in art.
Nice work fourth grade!
I'm really excited to get started on those drums.



No comments:

Post a Comment