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Norman Shapiro wrote to the geometry newsgroups one day offering to share materials from his Geometry Through Art workshops. We immediately expressed an interest, ever ready to seize an opportunity to bring more teaching materials to the Forum and to build our site with contributions direct from the classroom. As we looked over his handouts and the artwork they can generate, we realized this would be a good moment to experiment with taking someone's lessons and turning them into Web pages that would be useful to others. You will find here a wonderful assortment of lesson ideas, facilitation suggestions, lists of materials needed, and handouts for you to photocopy. Mr. Shapiro focuses on the student as investigator, learning through doing, and using perception to stimulate the motivation for more developed concepts and language. Art is one of the intrinsically interesting applications of geometry and these pages point to a wonderful way in to this topic for children and adults alike.

Various geometry math lesson ideas

Students will identify polygons and angles in Tony Smith's sculpture Moondog. They will then create a sculpture with polyhedra nets, calculate the cost of covering sculpture in gold, and write an exhibit label for their finished sculpture. Lastly, they will research the origin of words related to geometry.

Students will compare and contrast design elements in neoclassical and modern architecture, using the National Gallery of Art's West and East Buildings. Then they will design a geometric pattern using Pei's polygons. Last, they will consider the role of geometry in planning and designing buildings and cities by creating their own city plan using a variety of lines and polygons.

Testing understanding of symmetry

Fun!

There's lots of information on the Web about fractals, but most of it is either just pretty pictures or very high-level mathematics. So this fractals site is for kids, to help them understand what the weird pictures are all about - that it's math - and that it's fun! Teachers: Every lesson has a print version for classroom use.