🎄Twenty-five triangles, one giant Christmas tree. Every student colors a single piece, and the pieces join edge to edge into a 30 x 40 inch class poster — with real geometry built into every row.
You'll check out and download on Teachers Pay Teachers. Prices there may include a sale.
A tessellation is a pattern with no gaps and no overlaps, and this poster lets a whole class build one together. Each student gets a single triangle, 6 inches wide and 8 inches tall, colors a design, cuts it out and writes a name or a holiday wish on the banner. Twenty-five finished triangles fit together into a tree 30 inches wide and 40 inches tall — big enough for a classroom door, a hallway display or the stage at a winter concert.
The building never turns into a puzzle. Assembly maps label every spot in the tree T for a tree piece or O for an ornament piece, and they cover trees of 4, 9, 16, 25 or 36 pieces, so the project fits a class of any size. A print chart says exactly how many of each piece to print and how big the finished tree will be, and six illustrated steps walk the class from coloring to taping the seams on the back.
The geometry is real, and it runs at two levels. Younger students meet tessellations with the “What Is a Tessellation?” poster, a “Do They Tessellate?” page and a page for counting the tree pieces. Older students hunt for the square number pattern hiding in the rows — 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 — and use the real measurements of each piece to find triangle area. An answer key covers every math page.
The project ends with writing, not just display. The “My Piece of Our Tree” page asks each student to reflect on their part in the class tree, which makes the poster a community project as well as a geometry lesson. With eight tree designs, four ornament designs and a design-your-own option for each, no two class trees look the same.
📖 Teaching guide · 13 min readTessellation Christmas Tree: A Collaborative Geometry Poster for Grades 1–6Read the guide →The poster works because every student owns exactly one piece of it. The assembly maps remove the guesswork, so the class spends its time coloring, cutting and talking about tessellations instead of arguing about where pieces go — and the two math levels mean the same poster teaches shape fitting to a 1st grader and triangle area to a 6th grader.
Grades 1–6. Level 1 pages (grades 1–2) introduce tessellations and counting, and Level 2 pages (grades 3–6) work with square number patterns and triangle area.
The 25-piece tree is 30 x 40 inches. The print chart and assembly maps also cover trees of 4, 9, 16 and 36 pieces, so the project fits smaller and larger classes.
Every piece is 6 inches wide and 8 inches tall, in every design, so tree and ornament pieces mix freely.
One. Each student colors and cuts a single triangle piece, writes a name or a holiday wish on its banner, and the class assembles all the pieces into one poster.
🦌
Created byActivity ExpressReindeer math craft for grades K–4: 25 differentiated level pages from counting to multiplication, with a bulletin-board display.
🔮
Created byActivity ExpressBuild a snow globe craft for grades PreK–6: winter, Christmas and Three Kings Day globes with writing at three levels.
⭐
Created byActivity ExpressNew Year goal setting for grades 1–8: My One Word 2027 pennants, writing at three levels and a year-long tracker.
👾
Created byActivity ExpressA free Halloween roll and draw for K–5: two leveled charts, a monster drawing mat, descriptive and persuasive writing, a partner game and a class graph.