Geometry Through Art

The Forum and Norman Shapiro

Norman Shapiro wrote to the geometry newsgroups one day offering to share materials from his Geometry Through Art workshops. We immediately expressed an interest, ever ready to seize an opportunity to bring more teaching materials to the Forum and to build our site with contributions direct from the classroom. As we looked over his handouts and the artwork they can generate, we realized this would be a good moment to experiment with taking someone's lessons and turning them into Web pages that would be useful to others.

You will find here a wonderful assortment of lesson ideas, facilitation suggestions, lists of materials needed, and handouts for you to photocopy. Mr. Shapiro focuses on the student as investigator, learning through doing, and using perception to stimulate the motivation for more developed concepts and language. Art is one of the intrinsically interesting applications of geometry and these pages point to a wonderful way in to this topic for children and adults alike.

As the Math Forum we count on bringing out of hiding many more of these treasures tucked away in math classrooms around the country. We hope that what you see here will be useful; even more, we hope that you'll consider following in Norman Shapiro's footsteps and will work with the Forum to put your own materials on the Web.

Steve Weimar
Program Administrator
The Geometry Forum