Fun with tangrams

Have you ever heard of tangrams? I hadn't until I came across the concept during a late-night Pinterest session a few days ago but now I am obsessed. Tangrams, which are puzzles made up of seven different shapes that form a square, have been around for thousands of years and used for everything from entertainment in the trenches during WWI to modern day intelligence tests. The gist of the tangram is to look at a silhouetted outline -- of a bird or tree or building, for example -- and to recreate it from the tans, the shapes that make up the tangram.

The pin I found was for making a tangram out of wood, but instead, I used a pack of foam sheets from our craft box. Everybody in the house has taken turns playing with the tangram pieces but I think A. likes them best of all. I'll park her at the front door with a bowl of water (water makes the foam stick to the glass) and she'll play for the better part of an hour, using the tans to freestyle a little art while I do laundry or get dinner on the table. I really love how the tangram forces her how to use an unfamiliar set of shapes to idealize familiar concepts (and some of the designs look pretty cool, too).


(The photos above are, according to A., a daddy, an airplane, and a sailboat.)

Who knew geometry could be so fun? (Besides my h.s. geometry teacher who promised me it would be if I could just give it a chance...)

Happy weekend!