I've come across a few mathsy-arty Halloween-themed ideas over the last week or two, and include here three that would make lovely classroom activities.
An Origami Bat
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A quick google will lead you to a host of Halloween-themed origami projects, but it can be difficult to find something suitable for folding with a class of students. This simple but effective origami bat by Nick Robinson (@nickorigami) is perfect. In addition, @senbazurueurope has made an instructional video (below), which may also be useful.
There are always lots of opportunities for mathematical discussion when folding origami with students. See my Origami in Lessons page if you are interested in learning more about using this wonderful art form in your classroom.
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Geometric Halloween masks
These geometric paper masks by @Wintercroft (below), available from www.wintercroft.com, have often caught my eye on Twitter, and when I found out that there was a sixth form Halloween Fancy Dress Day coming up on the 31st, I finally had an excuse to try them out! I treated my Y12 Further Maths group to a mask-making session after their end of term assessment. No photos of their handiwork yet, as students have taken them home to finish - I'm very much looking forward to seeing their end results on Monday.
These masks are not strictly-speaking origami, but are instead constructed from printable 'nets' or templates. Although the masks are sold for personal use only, Wintercroft are keen to promote craft in educational settings, and will allow the printing of class sets for one-off projects, so long as the digital files are not saved or stored on shared computers, or otherwise shared or distributed.
The masks can be made from cereal boxes or other recycled card, but I printed the templates directly onto white 160 gsm card, which was just about sturdy enough. We used the slightly more time-consuming, but more robust, tabbed assembly method and stuck the pieces together using a glue stick. I made the bat half-mask (above, top left) and found it very straight-forward to assemble. I shall spray paint it black, and swoop around campus on Monday :)
The templates come with full instructions, but there is also a video guide. And the maths? As well as encouraging patience, perseverance and attention to detail, this would be a good activity to link to polygons, nets and polyhedra - how many different polygonal faces can your students spot and name? And what about the challenge of designing their own geometric mask?!
Tessellated Halloween skulls
Chris Watson (@tessellationART), a digital tessellation artist, has produced a wonderful short video that shows the design process behind one of his recent pieces, a skulls triptych inspired by Mexican 'Day of the Dead' imagery. As well as incorporating tessellations, the skulls also include a repeating fractal element where the skull appears again in the eye socket, and again, disappearing off into infinity. This is a really nice resource for stimulating class discussion on lots of levels.
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In addition Chris has provided a printable skull tile or 'tessera' for students to decorate individually and then combine to produce a whole-class (or school) tessellated Halloween display. This could look amazing!
There are other high quality tessellation resources on Chris' website www.tessellationart.com, including a beautiful short video explaining the concept of tessellations, and other tessellation templates for use in lessons. Definitely worth exploring.
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Do feedback in the comments below, or on Twitter, if you try any of the activities. I'd love to see photos of your students' work. And Happy Halloween!
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