Tantalising Tangrams

This week’s morning tasks have been taken from the Nrich Advent Calendar that was shared in the newsletter.  Each day, we have a different mathematical puzzle to solve.  Today we had many different individual shapes to fit together to create four equal rectangles. This was much harder than it sounds as we did not know the size of the shapes.  Shown here are A and A who completed the challenge through trial and adjustment- having a go and then making changes when it is not initially successful.  Other groups thought about the size of the pieces and how they would fit together, the human calculators in the class worked out the area of all of the pieces and divided it by 4 to help their puzzling.

We then moved on to work on tangrams- a Chinese geometric puzzle where a square is divided into seven different shapes that are then rearranged to make new patters.  A bit like a mathematical jigsaw puzzle!