Tesselations in Nature

A few weeks ago I talked about a tesselation project I was planning with a 4th grade class. They finished it yesterday! This was a good, quick project and a good way to evaluate their understanding of a math concept in writing. Students were each assigned a type of tesselation found in nature, then the cropped in on it and explained why (or why not) it was made of polygons. They were to use math vocabulary and be clear in their explanation that they understood the concept. We spent about 15 minutes on one day reviewing sites to find pictures on such as Creative Commons and Edupic so that we can use the pictures, and one day for about an hour making the powerpoints. So in a very short time, we had a good use of copyright friendly images, math review and assessment, writing using information to support your case, using picture toolbar tools in powerpoint to crop the picture, and they are going to share them as a class to guess what they are. That covered a lot in a short project! To add on in future projects, I would maybe also have them research the topics a little too, but we wanted short and sweet to focus on math this time. Here are some of their end results.

Edited to add: I created a Livebinder of my sources or  you can see it below.

Tessellations