5th Grade Nature-Based Block Prints

Woohoo! Another printmaking project! This is a new lesson I wrote this past school year when a student teaching project wasn't working out so well. 

The basis of this project was patterns found in nature. We started out by looking at a bunch of photographs of naturally occurring patterns. If you look for it, there are some pretty astounding patterns and designs on plants and animals. I even brought in some math (gasp!) and talked about the Fibonacci sequence and how it is related to the golden ratio that can often be found in nature. 

An example of the golden ratio in plant form!

Each student then used some reference material to sketch out a few different zoomed in views of natural patterns. The best drawing was then transferred to a piece of EZ-Kut block printing material that I had pre-cut as equilateral triangles. The triangular shape was a definite departure from other printmaking lessons in the past. 

Before they printed, students lightly sketched out where they wanted to print. Most students chose to do a random kind of layout. If I were to change anything about the project next year, I would at least want students to make a symmetrical layout of their final prints - the work that turned out the best used symmetry this year.