Rangoli Patterns

In Maths, we have been learning about the symmetry in Rangoli Patterns. We had a go at making our own!

Diwali

By Soma  

Diwali is coming up and this year it falls on the 24th of October 2022. Diwali is also known as the Festival of Lights and it came from India. We celebrate it because it’s the start of the Hindu New year. My family celebrates diwali because my mum and grandparents are Indian. We dress in our traditional Indian clothes, eat Indian sweets and we get henna done at the Diwali Festival every year. Every year my grandparents give us kids presents and my Nani (grandmother) cooks us a really yummy Indian dinner. We don’t eat meat on diwali so all the food is vegetarian.

Rangoli patterns

Rangoli patterns are a sign of peace. They symbolise the god of luck,money and wisdom as her name is Lakshmi, an Indian god. During Diwali they draw Indian patterns called rangoli. It is believed that they are good to keep away bad thoughts and spirits. The more complicated they are, the better they work. Rangoli patterns are a colourful design drawn near the entrance to welcome guests. It is a symbol of prosperity, growth and luck. Rangoli is traditionally made by coloured coconut powder, rice, grains, flour, sand or chalk. Rangoli patterns are often used in henna patterns.

Celebrating Diwali through drama and designing rangoli patterns

It's the Indian festival of Diwali at the moment. To celebrate, we've been learning about the story behind Diwali, and Rama and Sita's exile from their kingdom and then their return with the help of Hanuman, king of the monkeys. We acted it out and also wrote about some of the main characters in the legend...

           Ravana

His ten heads swinging and snapping, his twenty arms flailing wildly, the demon king launched himself into the battle!  Ten of his twenty glowing red eyes searching for Rama. I need to kill that man he thought. He kept moving though because he knew that if he stopped the monkey army would sooner or later find his weakness.  Suddenly he saw Rama.  He sprinted towards him and started slashing at him with ten sharp swords! Rama responded immediately and with the battle raging around them they fought their own battle.  Ravana fought like, a demon.

By Hugo M

We've also been designing rangoli art to celebrate Diwali. We had to show how we could transform 2D shapes by doing some tessellation, rotation, reflection and translation.


Some of us made videos to show this maths learning instead of art.