Hello, families and students!

We are coming to the end of a fun and activity-packed week, and I am sad to see everyone go!

In our teams, we had a trivia competition and incorporated the bonus blog questions, plus our vocabulary and lots of information from the past few days from all the literature we read, art we evaluated, and active learning we did. Everyone did a great job, and a few teams even figured out the clues for the hardest questions: the meaning of tessellation and the word ‘incendiary’.

For our final lesson, we dove into the fantastic world of M.C. Escher – a brilliant artist and mathematician who used tessellation to twist perception and create prints of impossible buildings and objects that have been featured in everything from movies likeThe Labyrinth and Inception to pranks and internet hoaxes like Penrose staircase at the Rochester Institute of Technology. We observed several of Escher’s works right up until our brains started hurting trying to conceptualize them. Then, we tried to figure out how tessellation patterns are created and what they can tell us about the nature of reality, the world around us, and changing perception.

After lunch, we began our final project: to create our own tessellation stencil and then use it to create a perspective-bending artwork! We had funky cats and spikey hedgehogs, alien trees and ghosts, little monsters and interesting shapes and designs. All of which fit together perfectly in repeating patterns! Ask your student how to create a tessellation stencil and show you how to make a perception-changing picture that might make you question: what is the nature of reality and the truth?

Thank you all for a great class!

Until next time,

Ms. Rho