Crib Sheet Our guide to educational jargon, teaching methods and the strange things children may bring back from school as homework. If there is a particular aspect of your child's education you wish explaining, use the POL Ask an Expert service. Tessellation Tessellation is a way of making patterns out of smaller shapes. The word comes from 'tesserae' - the small tiles used to make mosaics. Studying tessellation helps children learn about the properties of two dimensional shapes. When teachers talk about tessellation, they tend to mean making patterns which can be repeated indefinitely using regular shapes, without overlapping them or leaving spaces between them.

Example of Tessellated Pattern

Sometimes teachers ask children to make a pattern using only one shape; sometimes the activity will involve using more than one shape; and sometimes the children will be asked to discover which shapes will tessellate and which will not. The activity may be left purely as a maths exercise, or it can be extended into other areas - for instance, by exploring different ways of emphasising the repeating patterns by using colour, or using tessellated patterns as surface decoration in a design project.

You can try this for yourself by printing off these shapes, cutting them out and using them as templates. [examples: fairly large pictures of squares, oblongs, triangles of different types, pentagons, hexagons etc. may be used.]

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