← Azul

For teachers

A colouring page for every child in the room, and no two of them the same. Each one is drawn from that child's own name.

Make a pack for your class

Type the register, one name to a line. You get a single PDF, one page per child, in the order you typed them — so they can be handed out down the list without sorting anything.

One per line. Any script: Arabic, Latin, Chinese. Two children with the same name get the same pattern, which is true and worth saying out loud.

Line weight

Thick lines for small hands; finer ones hold more detail and take longer.

Paper

Type a name to begin.

In the room

  1. 1

    Hand them out

    Every child gets the pattern their own name draws. Ask them, before anything else, whether they can find two that are alike.

  2. 2

    Colour by shape, not by space

    The oldest way to colour these is to pick one shape and find every other piece the same, the way a zellij workshop sorts cut tiles into heaps. It turns colouring into looking.

  3. 3

    Ask why it closes up

    The lines meet exactly at the edge of every tile. Nothing about that is luck, and a child who notices it has found the whole construction on their own.

Where it comes from

Every one of these is built by a construction recovered from the buildings a century ago: a point on each edge, two rays leaving it at the same angle, running until they meet. Fifteen grounds, and one parameter. There is a page for each of them showing the ground, the pattern and what the angle does.

How these are made →

Free to print, for any number of children, always. The patterns are geometry and nothing else — no figures, and no sacred text or names, because a colouring page ends up crumpled in a bin and nobody should have to think about that.