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Mr. Greenman's Class looked at the work of M.C. Escher, who created intricate designs that often used geometric transformations. Escher often made tessellations, designs that follow a pattern that repeats indefinitely with images that cover an entire plane without overlapping. In this lesson, Mr. Greenman's students made their own tessellating designs. Tessellations deal with important geometric concepts such as transformations and congruence. Each student creates a figure (or tile) that will tessellate. Each figure in the student's design is congruent; this is easy to see because Mr. Greenman chose to use grid paper for the designs. Each tile in the design has the same area (in the design at top left, the area of each tile is 9 square units; at top right, each tile is 16 square units). Each tile is also translated on the plane: sliding a figure in any direction without rotating or reflecting it. Indicators: 2.5.4.1 identify transformations in a tessellation. 2.6.5.1 identify congruent and similar figures. 2.6.4.1 locate, give coordinates of, and graph plane figures that are the results of reflections and translations in all quadrants of the coordinate plane. Download Centimeter Grid Paper

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