I was reading the introduction to Mike Ollerton's 'Learning and Teaching Mathematics Without a Textbook' (available from the ATM) which gives an inspirational account of how he thinks Mathematics should be taught.  I was particularly interested in his resources wish-list, and the different types of paper he mentions.  I have also had many fruitful ideas from experimenting with different types of paper.   

Here is a website where you can create all sorts of different types of paper.  There are more types of paper at NRICH, for example dotty circles, which I used for investigating sequences.

I love dotty paper for exploring tessellations.  But what else could you use it for?

A simple game I came up with this year was an adaptation of boxes, but with triangle dotty paper.  Players get 1 point for making a triangle, but 3 points for making a rhombus and 6 points for making a hexagon.  I am sure there are other rules you could put in there to develop this game further. 

The Pascal's triangle activities on this website also came from messing around with triangle dotty paper.  

I have previously used dotty paper for drawing Koch snowflakes and using them to investigate area and perimeter.  

There are a range of excellent NRICH tasks that use square dotty paper such as Pick's Theorem and Tilted Squares (see images on the right).

When I taught level 4-6 triangles and quadrilaterals this year, I used triangle dotty paper and we drew tessellations to investigate angles in a straight line and angles round a point.     

If you come up with any nice ideas using dotty paper please post them on the blog.