Have you ever realized how much creativity there is in math? The Arts (visual arts, music and dance) are creative mediums that are interconnected with mathematical concepts and reasoning. When children are engaged in the Arts they are developing their artistic skills as well as their mathematical skills in a variety of areas (e.g., spatial reasoning, proportional reasoning and problem solving). Artists work creatively and flexibly with geometric shapes, scaling, patterns, fractions and many more mathematical concepts. The Arts is a playful way to inspire young mathematicians.
Here are some activities to try with your child:
Paper Folding
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Fold your paper into a triangle that does not include any edges of the paper. Convince a skeptic that it is a triangle.
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Fold your paper into a square that does not include any edges of the paper. Convince a skeptic that it is a square.
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Fold your paper into an isosceles triangle that does not include any edges of the paper. Convince a skeptic that it is an isosceles triangle.
Boaler, Jo. Mindsets Mathematics: Visualizing and Investigating Big Ideas: Grade 4, 2017
Painting by Numbers by nrich
With painting by numbers, a line drawing is split into regions which are to be painted according to the rules that:
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No two regions of the same colour can share a border
- Two regions of the same colour are allowed to meet at a point.
Consider these two images, one made from intersecting ellipses and one made from overlapping rectangles (include the outer square boundaries in the image)
What is the smallest number of colours needed to colour these pictures according to the colouring rules? Prove your results clearly.
For more information on this task visit NRICH's math website.
Picture This from Artful Math by Crayola
For more information about art and math:
To find out what your child will learn in math this year or to find other fun activities that you can do together as a family, please visit our Math page. Be sure to also try our Problem of the Month.