When we first walked in to Tara’s class, I quickly spotted the plastic shapes that we would be using during the input. First thoughts: We were getting to play around for the hour. To an extent this was true.

I remember being taught a shape song during primary school, a song that would drive my grandparents wild every time I would sing it – thinking back though, I did sing it a lot. But, ask me to repeat it to you today and I have no idea. I can’t remember any of the tune. I can’t even recall the shapes themselves. So when Tara asked everyone to name the shapes, I stayed quiet. Triangles, squares and rectangles, yes but anything with more than 4 sides and I begin to struggle to recall. However, the more we spoke through them, the more it all started to resonate inside my brain.

We soon discovered that shapes which can tessellate are heavily used within Islamic art. I had never thought about shapes within art, never mind religious art. It soon became clear that in order to tessellate shapes had to join up together at a certain point creating an angle of 360 degrees. For example, triangles will tessellate as they will each bring an angle of 90 degrees to the shape, combining to make 360. This allows them to stick together leaving no gaps (shown bellow).  Squares also follow this rule (Shown below).

However, some shapes did not follow this rule and therefore could not tessellate such as pentagons and octagons. We tried to move them around in order to fill each gap, but were not successful. The gaps were too small to fit in another shape. This was interesting as I thought that all shapes would have been able to slot in with each other somehow. I was wrong.

I started to discover that I was enjoying learning about how shapes could influence a piece of art. I have always loved art and regularly try to visit exhibitions and museums whenever I get the chance. So being given the chance to create some of my own was fun. It painted maths in a interesting way that had never been shown to me before.

I hope to be able to one day incorporate this into a lesson when I have my own class as it is a excellent cross curriculum link between Math, RE and Art. It shows that art isn’t all about painting and drawing, but there is in fact some strategically importance behind decisions made when creating religious art. In my eyes, it paints maths in a practical and important way, one which is of high importance to many people across the world.

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTeqUejf3D0