Tiling Around a Fountain Task Implementation EPIC AT '25-'26 by Jana Mustard

2025-09-03 15:09:24 UTC

Tiling Around a Fountain task connects to expressions, equations, and functions in my standards. To keep it within 5–10 minutes, I would simplify the diagrams to just a few fountain sizes and ask students to quickly estimate, then justify, how many border tiles are needed. I could also provide graph paper or digital tools like Desmos to help students visualize the growing pattern. I would facilitate by encouraging students to share multiple strategies—such as area models, additive reasoning, or perimeter thinking—and have them explain why their approach works. This task is a meaningful way to engage students in reasoning, looking for structure, and making sense of mathematical relationships, which aligns closely with the practice standards and supports conceptual understanding.

2025-09-10 21:27:42 UTC

I would facilitate this task by already providing the first three models for my students. That way they can focus on finding the pattern and writing an expression that makes sense to their thinking. I would also have my student share their different expressions with the class. I could write down their expressions on the board and we can discuss how these expressions are equivalent to one another and how they all work to represent the pattern (give that they are correct expressions!).

This would connect to the 7th grade skill of writing equivalent expressions by combining like terms, using distributive property, and simplifying

Tiling Around A Fountain Task

2025-09-22 23:20:05 UTC

I would implement this task with my students while we are discussing linear relationships. It might be helpful to provide them with more than just the 1x1 fountain diagram to help them get started. I really like the idea of letting them come up with a variety of expressions that represent the relationship and then doing a gallery walk to see all of the different diagrams and expressions. It would then be cool to combine like terms/distribute/etc. to show how the expressions are equivalent. This would make a great Building Thinking Classrooms activity.