December 24, 2010

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WALLS 360 recently announced that 100 teachers and classrooms from around the world would be getting a FREE set of WALL TANGRAMS FOR TEACHERS, and the winners were notified today!

http://blog.walls360.com/walls-360-tangrams-for-teachers

WALLS 360 invited educators globally to tell us how they would use our new INTERACTIVE WALL TANGRAMS in their own classrooms, and we selected the winning entries via random number generation.

100 educators globally will have their free wall tangram sets next week, and we received some inspiring entries from around the world – from Maryland to Borneo!

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I am an Art and Math teacher teaching high school students. These interactive wall tangrams look useful for so many reasons – as geometrical teaching aids for Maths, and compositional teaching aids for the principles of design. I could even guide my older students to use the shapes to form logos or symbols to express concepts visually – a first step in my logo design class. With their huge size and ability to be repositioned, I will never have to rely on computer projected images again. Kinesthetic learners in my class will be better able to grasp ideas as they get a hands-on experience. Great work on the tangrams!

I love these! I currently teach reading intervention, and these tangrams would be perfect for creating story starters and writing prompts.

I am a fifth grade reading teacher. It is such a blessing that I’ve stumbled upon your site. I have some great enriching ideas about using tangrams in literacy education. Many of my students are textile/kinesthetic learners who learn through feeling and touching and manipulating things. I would love to make a book report where students use tangrams to create the main character in their story or a writing prompt that allows students to interpret a shape made with tangrams and write about its meaning. What a great way to incorporate art and mathematics into my instruction! With 78 students, this great learning tool would be reaching a wide range of student learners. I am thrilled at this opportunity!

I am an English teacher from Sabah, Malaysia (northern part of Borneo). A set of those tangrams will be very useful for my pupils. I teach English as a second language (third, actually) and that would be very useful for teaching vocabulary, as it can be transformed into many items. That’ll be another fun activity for my pupils.

Teaching social studies in the island of Malta. This would be a great tool for interacting with students and showing how similar and different at the same time people can be, especially in the world of work and social status. Might serve as encouragement as well…

We have so little opportunity to incorporate art into our maths teaching. I would leave them as a talking point / allow students to ponder them, wonder about them, and allow them to try classic forms or their own designs. I would start small (create the square, a rectangle, a triangle, etc) and move on to eg. the candle, etc. 21st Century pupils trying out thousand + year old problems interactively – priceless!

Wow, what an amazing idea and a stunning example of how simplicity might work fueling students creativity. It also has some aesthetic appeal to it. I’ve been an elementary school teacher for 5 years and now I’m working as a PhD-student at the University of Twente (Enschede, Holland). The way that I would use the Walls360 tangrams: engage with it in classes that I do research in and just see what 4-6 year olds can come up with. Keep up the good work.

I teach ESL in a small city 30 minutes west of Tokyo. Tangrams would be very useful to communicate concepts or objects in my kids classes, where language is often lacking. Happy Holidays!

I would love to put em up and inspire students to reinvent, reinterpret them and reuse the idea to invent both 2d and 3d objects, or possibly animate them and make short stop motion films, or make t-shirt prints or linos, or inspire them to create logos and illustrations from simple shapes so that we could make screen prints and then send you photos of them in use! I’m an art teacher so I am sure I could find a million uses for em!

My 1st grade inclusion classroom always uses tangrams! We use the tangrams to help my students to better understand flat shapes, patterns, colors, compare and contrast size and shape, congruency, symmetry, and even just for fun when we do Tangram puzzles. Its fun to watch my students who often struggle with paper/pencil part of math really come into their own when given manipulatives like tangrams! Currently I share with my team and would love to have set to keep in my classroom so the students can use them all the time!

I’d definitely put it up for my first graders to play with. 83% of our school qualifies as being in poverty, so this would be a great opportunity for them to have something unique and fun they normally aren’t exposed to.

We are an interactive children’s museum in the Philippines. We usually do creative and interactive learning sessions with disadvantaged children and a tangram would be a perfect aid. They can make shapes, animals, objects and what nots. : )

I am a brand new literacy and math intervention teacher. I am currently using tangrams that I made and laminated myself. I have to remake them over the holiday break, they haven’t gotten worn out easily with several groups using them. They are a wonderful tool in my lessons. Having a set of actual tangrams would be great for my kids. I will be able to use them cross-curricular with math and language arts. I have found activities so I can use them in my literacy and writing activities as well. Using a wall set would give me the ability to have all of my children in a group work together with one set of tangrams.

I use Tangrams every spring when teaching my 3rd graders geometry. The possibilities are endless and they not only teach properties of mathematics (you can make a square using two triangles!), they also encourage creativity – something many schools and classrooms unfortunately lack. Being a design junkie as well, the beautiful aesthetic of these Tangrams definitely doesn’t hurt.. ;D amazing work!

I teach in an inclusive 2nd grade class and I would use the tangrams for geometry lessons, especially emphasizing plane or flat shapes and how the shapes can be used to make new shapes. I would also use the shapes for translations, i.e. flips, slides, turns. The students love using these manipulatives and having a class set would be fantastic.

Five triangles, one square and a parrallelogram- the possibilities really are endless. The self adhesive, interactive option is icing on the cake! Not only can I see using these tangrams in math and art in my first grade class, the social studies connections are also endless. I’d include a study of the historical, cultural and geographic origins in China. And, I welcome the opportunity to see what the kids create with the tangrams when we study symbols and map making!

Wow! These are beautiful and can easily lead to so much imaginative play. I homeschool my boys, who are 4 and 6, and they would love working with these, especially because they adhere to the wall. My boys love using the walls as work surfaces, covering much of them with their own artwork. Truly a beautiful idea.

This looks really awesome, it could sure be used in my math classroom in the Netherlands! I just love the puzzling aspect of math, and this would make it so much more cool to do in my lessons.

These are so outstanding! Finding new ways to teach at home is an ongoing challenge, and tangrams are a great way to engage all seven children at once, together. They have a blast playing with and helping one another create new designs. Wonderful!

Greetings from The Netherlands! These tools will seriously help me to show my students that creativity goes as far as your mind goes. That’s sometimes hard to explain and I think that those tools can open many, MANY doors for my students. Looking forward to show my students that there are so many ways to solve a problem by being creative with multiple tools. Great idea, congrats!

I just read my friend’s tweet about this program. And I directly go to your blog. It is amazing, fascinating. I wonder if my class has this tangram will be great. My students will be more interesting in attending my class. In Indonesia, esp. In public school, there is no wall with picture. It is always painted plain. It makes the students boring. If I get the chance, I think it will help my students more interesting following my class and be happy in my class.

Wow, I just started (2 months ago) teaching a design and Photoshop class to 12 year olds, this would be a great learning and imagination sparkle tool for the class! Awesome!

I am associated with Rainbow school – an institution for children from the underprivileged section of the society and children with learning handicaps whom the regular schools do not accommodate. The tangram sets will prove to be immensely useful in education and entertainment value. This should improve the hand-eye coordination of children with disabilities and fire-up the imagination of the regular kids.

The tangrams sets would definitely help a lot in education. I love playing since I was in kindergarten. And I am now a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong. Hope I can share this with my students!

I am a fourth grade teacher, and these re-positionable wall tangrams are an amazing educational tool – from shapes and colors for younger kids, to spatial geometry and design for the older ones. And they are super easy to hang and re-hang. Just peel and stick! I am actually working on a number of lesson plans that incorporate Wall Tangrams, and I think that this is an amazing new product!

Tangrams are such a great learning tool for students. As a brand new elementary teacher, dying to have a classroom of her own, having a set of tangrams would be a wonderful start! I have seen children use tangrams and become so involved in the creation of new pictures and, it fascinates me as much as it does them. I have never seen a set so colorful either. Anything that is fun and educational at the same time is a must in my book!

Tangrams have so many wonderful uses in the classroom! They assist with learning colors and shapes. They are useful for geometry, design, fractions. They make great puzzles for critical thinking, much better than jigsaw puzzles. Most of all they are fun!

These are cool! I’m envisioning team-building in my high school classroom (what can you make from these shapes?) and/or geometric-spacial learning activities in my daughter’s classroom . . . yes please!

I am a brand new literacy and math intervention teacher. I am currently using tangrams that I made and laminated myself. I have to remake them over the holiday break, they haven’t gotten worn out easily with several groups using them. They are a wonderful tool in my lessons. Having a set of actual tangrams would be great for my kids. I will be able to use them cross-curricular with math and language arts. I have found activities so I can use them in my literacy and writing activities as well. Using a wall set would give me the ability to have all of my children in a group work together with one set of tangrams.

This is awesome – I can remember having a plastic set of these as a child. A wall sized version would be spectacular imagination starters.

These are so beautiful, great colours. What a fabulous giveaway. They will look wonderful and start so many sparks of imagination.

These are awesome! Not only do I want a set for my classrooms but for me to play with at home. These will be a great teaching tool in our math classes.

These look amazing! What a great way to have students get excited to learn. Great daily warm up and center use!

I would love to display the dynamic tangrams in a classroom full of math students. Let them play. An engaged student is a learning student!

Picture your life in tangram? The latest trend in coaching questions.

They’re great. Love the quality and the possibilities. As a staff development teacher and math resource teacher for a K-5 elementary school, I will definitely recommend this wonderful tool to my teachers.

Love Tangrams! The kids adore playing with them and making the shapes. We read Grandfather Tang and they especially like making the characters in the story after they have read it. It’s fun to watch the light bulb go on when they figure out how to make a shape.

My classroom does not have a magnetic whiteboard so these adhesive tangrams would be great during my geometry lessons. I can use them when teaching about the various geometric shapes and fractions as well. They would also be great to use for an art project using shapes.

I think that these wall tangrams would be great for a new teacher like myself. One idea I had for them is an interactive bulletin board. Each week there could be a new picture using tangramd on the wall. The students could work on recreating the image. Also throughout the week the students could work at a center to create new images. Really there are an infinate amount of uses for these tangrams.

These wall tangrams would be a great time-filler for my 7th grade Special Ed students.

Our fourth grade students really enjoy tangrams. We currently use a small set on an overhead projector. Being able to use large ones in class would probably be more enjoyable for the students – and the teacher!

I’ve always done tangram-making as one of my teaching activities in maths lessons. The sets usually are all one colour, so having a get of coloured tiles would certainly help weaker students with solving some of the puzzles…There are some pretty good maths challenges you can do with tangrams, as well as making pictures!

It would be great if we get the opportunity. In Indonesia, esp. Public school, we don’t have any wall pictures, we only have the plain painted wall. If we get the opportunity, it will be the first here. Its an honor 🙂