Art and Maths

I always love it when different subjects come together. One of the requirements for maths at this level is that children 'draw representations of 3D shapes using different methods', so what better way to do this than in an art lesson?

When planning these art/maths lessons, I happened to come across this idea on Arteascuola (I just discovered this blog, hence borrowing ideas from it two weeks in a row - she has loads of amazing lessons!). This lesson focused on using shading to make shapes look 3D.

This child only used one style of shading but got very into doing the patterns!

Because I was trying to cover both art and maths, we started with a discussion about different 3D shapes and their properties. Then we thought about how three of these shapes - the cylinder, cube and sphere - could look on paper, looking especially at how many faces we could see in one go.

After looking carefully at real 3D objects, I demonstrated methods for drawing them and the children practised on dry-wipe boards before adding them on paper. We then looked at the importance of adding tone to make the shapes look 3D and practised shading, cross-hatching and 'overlapping scrawls' (thank you to Arteascuola for the great step-by-step description - see the link above!).

The final step was adding patterns in felt-tipped pens for the background. We didn't really sped enough time on this last step to do it justice, but most pupils did manage three 3D-style shapes by the end of the lesson!