Pattern blocks

After the inspiration from Henry Bermudez I decided to have my lesson be to create a pattern and mark cube. Within Bermudez's work one can see moments of mark-making where the design elements are related to repetitive hand motions as well as moments of patterning with more specific repeated motifs. Bermudez finds patterns within his environment, and students can do so as well to create their own marks and patterns.

I have a cube template with 6 squares printed on card stock or traced onto watercolor paper, and each square should be filled in with a mark or pattern inspired by one's surroundings or from the imagination using a fine felt-tip marker. Once filled, the template is cut out, folded, and tabs are glued in the order shown. I tried this out with my daughter- hers is on the left and mine is on the right.

I scanned my template and attempted to upload it as a pdf. I'm not really sure this will work, but let's see:

The cubes have multiple possibilities. This should be a one day lesson to make them, but they'll be useful for another project. You can do cube and geometric solids drawing. You can use them as dice to play a zen-tangles game, or roll two together and try to create a new pattern combining elements from both showing.