Seven Magical Tans
Tangrams are geometry made into 3D, creative fun! Print off some paper tangrams or make your own from craft foam. Then put on your visual-spatial thinking cap as you discover how to arrange the tiles to make animals, people, or objects.
Put away the math workbook and play with tangrams for your math lesson tomorrow. Demonstrate that you understand math vocabulary by manipulating the seven tans.
Tangrams are rather mysterious as no one know exactly how they came to be. We do know that tangrams originated in China. So playing with tangrams can be a nice hands-on activity for a unit study about China.
What Good are Tangrams?
Why play with tangrams? Besides being an entertaining diversion for a few minutes, what are the educational benefits of these seven shapes?
Tangrams are physical objects that children can use to experiment with geometric concepts. Children are concrete learners until around age 12. Using manipulatives such as tangrams is the best way to teach math to children from preschool to age 11. Flipping pieces and moving them around gives learners real experience with the properties of the shapes. Merely looking at a shape drawn in a textbook is not nearly as effective.
Manipulating tangrams stimulates the visual-spatial powers of the mind. Children who are already very skilled in visual-spatial tasks may find great success with tangram activities.
Lots of mathematical concepts are explored through the play with tangrams: congruency, symmetry, area, perimeter, and geometric shapes. Look at this list of 13 advanced mathematical terms that can be taught through the tangrams! Tangrams are not just for small children!
Rules of Tangram Play
- Use all seven pieces
- Lay them flat without overlapping
- Each piece must touch another
But feel free to break the rules in your math explorations!
Free Printable Tangrams
- IDEAS -- Tangram PDFs
- Several choices of tangrams -- black outlines, colored shapes, small or large, and even some pages of designs to create.
- Funorama
- Printable tangrams in PDF or GIF formats plus three activity pages.
- Tangram Patterns in B&W
- These small and large tangram patterns are simple black outlines in PDF. These are great for templates for making your own tangrams out of craft foam or cardboard.
- Super Duper Big B&W Tangram Pattern
- The biggest tangram pattern I can find online!
The Warlord's Puzzle
a fable of the origin of the tangram
This book is recommended by LivingMath.net as a living book for math study. Although not based on historical fact, The Warlord's Puzzle delves into the math concepts of the tans in an engaging story.
Pelican Publications shares a free PDF educational guide for this book that includes comprehension questions and activities. (Look a the bottom right of the page for the link.)
The Warlord's Puzzle
Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 12/30/2009)
In China, a beautiful ceramic tile lies shattered on the ground, and the artist who dropped it is sentenced to the land's worst punishment. The fierce warlord will execute the artist unless some wise person can put the seven pieces back together. That person will then be invited to live in the castle. Both locals and strangers from far away wait their turns for a chance to solve the warlord's puzzle.
After learning why these people are waiting to enter the castle, a peasant boy convinces his poor but wise father to join the line. This little boy starts them off on the first step to solving the puzzle-entering the contest.
Virginia Walton Pilegard wrote The Warlord's Puzzle as part of a teaching unit that uses informal geometry to strengthen students' visual learning abilities. Mrs. Pilegard studied elementary mathematics and completed both a B.A. and M.A. in Education. She then went on to teach elementary grades and in juvenile correction schools.
--- notes from the Publisher
Tangrams are Interdisciplinary
Math, art, and language arts get mixed up when you play with tangrams!
Here are photos from an hour of tangram exploration. We used tangram patterns, printed small, to make ATCs (Artist Trading Cards). Sprite even created a series of cards to tell a story about a knight who rides a horse to save the princess from a dragon.
Make Your Own Tangrams
- Craft Foam Tangrams
- A nice tutorial for making your own tangrams with craft foam.
- Tangram Directions -- an Advanced Math Activity
- This is not for babies! A thorough knowledge of mathematical vocabulary is necessary to follow the directions in order to tear a sheet of paper into a tangram set.
- Diagram for Making Tangrams by Folding and Cutting
- This is not a printable template but a set of directions with clear diagrams.
Making Tangrams Tutorial
Printable Puzzles to Solve
with Tangram Tiles
Print out some of these puzzle pages and let your children try to solve them by making the same shapes using the seven tans of the tangram.Later, let them create their own animals and people, trace them onto paper, and test each other.
- Christmas Themed Puzzles
- Try to make the shape shown with your tangrams.
- PDF Puzzles and Solutions
- Twelve pages, most with four puzzles each.
- Tangrams PDF direct link
- This PDF has a convenient selection of tangram history, directions for constructing you own set, as well as puzzles to solve (but no solutions).
- Rabbit Tangrams
- Three rabbit puzzles to solve. This PDF includes a basic tangram template as well as the solutions to the puzzles. Great for spring time tangram play!
- The Tangram Zoo
- Goats, birds, a polar bear, a camel, and even a huge rocket!
- Cleave Books Tangram Booklet
- This is a nice all in one PDF with background information, templates, and puzzles to solve. Just print the pages you need.
- Loads of Puzzles
- This PDF will give you the biggest bang for you ink's buck! Over 100 puzzles to solve (with solutions). The only downside is that the images are small.
- The Tangram Print and Play
- This is a great starter PDF with a green tangram to cut out, a page of puzzles, and a page of solutions.
Three Pigs, One Wolf and Seven Magic Shapes
Three Pigs, One Wolf, Seven Magic Shapes (level 3) (Scholastic Reader, Math)
Amazon Price: $3.99 (as of 12/30/2009)
Tangram Activities
beyond just making pictures
- Write Tangram Inspired Stories
- This site offers dozens of examples of student work. Show a few of these to your children, and they are sure to run off, inspired to write their own tangram stories.
The illustrations for the story come from images made from the tangrams. Simply trace the shapes onto paper and color them in. Write your story to go along with the images! Voila! A tangram story. - Tangram Worksheet
- This is a good introductory activity to the tangram -- a list of seven questions to answer about the tans.
- Area of Tangram Pieces
- Solve the area of all the tangram pieces with this middle level math activity.
- Elementary Geometry Lessons from Virginia Dept. of Education
- This PDF has some great worksheets to go along with an exploration of tangrams. Besides how to make your own tangrams, there are activities for finding perimeter and for spatial problem solving. You'll also find extension activities dealing with symmetry.
By the way, this doesn't look too "elementary" to me. This is quite challenging! - Tips for Manipulatives -- Tangrams
- This one page PDF has 15 questions that you could assign your students to answer as they work with tangrams. The skills addressed go from basic to advanced math.
- Tangram Fractions
- This is a sample lesson from a book called Simply Great Explorations in Geometry. Tangrams are used in a hands-on fractions activity.
- Tangrams - A Way to Visualize Fractions, Geometry, and Algebra
- Mr. L shares a 4 page PDF with tangram activities including fractions, decimals, percents, geometry, algebra, and language!
People are Blogging Tangrams
- Islamic Homeschool Diary: Homeschooling Q&A
- There isn't really a lot for them to get their head around at this age, but reading and writing and basic math is something we have started with the eldest since he turned seven. .... Tangrams are impsy. But so what. What exactly is the point to all this? Has our life improved because of these great accomplishments? Is he happier? It hit me after I read this article (thanks Khadijah): In the Waldorf approach, reading and writing are introduced in first ...
Tangram Math Art
Tangram Books & Toys
Tangrams: 330 Puzzles
Amazon Price: $6.95 (as of 12/30/2009)
Tangram Puzzles: 500 Tricky Shapes to Confound & Astound/ Includes Deluxe Wood Tangrams
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 12/30/2009)
Classic Tangoes
Amazon Price: $7.99 (as of 12/30/2009)
Tangram
Amazon Price: (as of 12/30/2009)
TANGRAMS CLASSPACK 6 COLORS
Amazon Price: $27.04 (as of 12/30/2009)
Guestbook
This fun tangram looking font comes from Dave's Free Fonts; he calls it Litebrite 1975.
Thanks for visiting!
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Reply
- Astrieanna Astrieanna Oct 25, 2009 @ 5:19 pm
- Great lens-- you seem to have covered all the important parts of the topic. =)
I've played with tangrams before, but I never realized that there was math involved. ^^::
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Reply
- SpellOutloud SpellOutloud Sep 11, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
- Wonderful lens! I haven't used Tangrams since college. I need to go find some for my kids.
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Reply
- Samantha Samantha Sep 11, 2009 @ 7:15 am
- Thank u 4 teaching me how 2 play TANGRAM!
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Reply
- My Activity Maker My Activity Maker Aug 10, 2009 @ 11:29 am
- We recently had a submission of an activity called "Easy Tangrams" that references this site. This is a great place for more information on Tangrams. Thank you! http://www.MyActivityMaker.com
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by Jimmie
Hello! I am a homeschooling, stay at home mom who loves to teach and learn. I enjoy cooking from scratch, blogging, photography, and traveling, but I...
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