World Tessellation Day is celebrated on June 17 in honour of M.C. Escher’s birthday and was created by author Emily Grosvenor of Oregon. More information can be found HERE. Emily Grosvenor wrote a book about a little girl named Tessa who saw shapes, patterns and designs in the world around here. The book Tessalation was launched on Kickstarter and I was happy to support it. In celebration of the book launch, the author asked some of the supporters to do blog posts about the book and be part of a blog tour. The blog post I did can be found HERE.

World Tessellation Day was promoted in our district with connections made to our BC mathematics curriculum and it was great to watch social media posts appear highlighting tessellations! You can find some of these posts by following the hashtag #WorldTessellationDay – I have shared some posts from Richmond teachers below.

This year, the Thursday before World Tessellation Day, I invited students to explore tessellations through materials in The Studio at Grauer after we looked at some of the pages of the book Tessalation. The investigation prompt was What can you find out about tessellations? Noticing the materials I put out, I need to remember to use some non-regular polygons as well.

On June 17, our district’s Math Play Space featured materials that tessellate and we set up tables at the Brighouse Public Library during after school hours. Many children and families visited to investigate with the materials.

I’m looking forward to making World Tessellation an annual public event not just in our schools but also in other places in our community!

~Janice