Tying in pointillism are during a unit on fractions, decimals, and percents is perfect! How? It begins with painter Georges Seurat.

Seurat was a post-impressionist painter who painted by placing tiny, preceise brush strokes of different colors close to one another so they blend at a distance. I share with the students his painting The Circus and we discuss the patience it probably took to paint the whole thing using tiny dots!

I then pass out loupes and colored comics from the Sunday paper. This is a great way to show them that the comics are actually made of tiny dots. Besides, the loupes and comics are a great hook!

Using a piece of paper that is significantly smaller than the size of Seurat’s painting, students use colored markers (I’ve also done it with paint and cotton swabs) to fill in their pencil line drawing. As they work, they need to keep track of how many of each color dot they use. I have them keep a tally each time they draw 10 dots of one color. They’ll need that information when we tie in the math.

When they are ready for the math, we talk about the entire pictuere as 100%. Each of the different colors represents a fraction of the total number of dots. So they write the numerator as number of (blue) dots and the denominator as the total number of dots. When they have the fractions written (and the colors should total the total number of dots), we then work on turning those fractions into dcimals and then into percentages.