Another 'new' word?

Am hereby claiming another 'new' word/phrase - 'mathARTmatical drawings'! (No results found on google!!). It's as it says on the tin - drawings created from numbers and other mathematical symbols. I know that many folk use such things to create images but most of them then seem to draw over/obliterate their original starting point. My pics incorporate the numbers as part of the final piece. In fact, I've also written (and illustrated) a couple of books that use this concept - 'Once Upon a Nine' and 'The 9 Days of Christmas'.

mathARTmatics

As I'm still covering a colleague on long term sick leave it's difficult to have as much of an influence on art across the school as I would like. I've given out lesson plans/notes to each year group and try to suggest ideas that they can easily implement.

Y2 are currently looking at their local environment and we've already sketched the local town. To this end I've tried to sneak art into their maths curriculum and have created the good old standby of a drawing that has to coloured according to a key. Different colours have different values (white=15, blue=10 etc.) They look at a section, work out the sum and then colour it in accordingly. Et voila - a stylised, coloured representation of the town.

 

today

In our maths lesson today, inspired by the 'picture pie' work of American illustrator Ed Emberley, we reminded ourselves all about simple shapes and fractions by creating pictures from circles. 

 

factors

Trying to help the children understand factors/products - came up with this Christmas themed way of representing them to make it a bit more interesting.

shapes

This week in Y3, it's shape! Again, trying to make it a little bit more creative, after the usual identification process, how many faces, edges, vertices etc., I gave them a quick tutorial on how to draw 3-D shapes. They were then let loose to see what wondrous images they came up with. (They had to annotate their pics to ensure it looked like they were doing some proper learning!)

This afternoon to tie in with Science ('Helping Plants Grow') and Literacy ('Wordplay'), we drew calligrams.

more mathARTmatics

Further fraction work - getting them to understand fractional parts of wholes. We have previously looked at the work of Mondrian and decided (well I did!) to try and create 'recognisable' abstract pictures based on a simple 4x4 grid.

Again, the children had to label (using a key) the fractional breakdown of their compositions. Am thinking of extending this by painting large versions for display around school.

mathARTmatics

Did some fraction work in Numeracy (maths) this morning with my group. Rather than just the mind-numbingly boring writing down of answers to shaded in bits of circles we created pictures. Using the work of Ed Emberley (http://www.edemberley.com/) as an inspiration, we created birds, flowers etc - all the while recognising the fractional parts that went into making them.