tangrams

This past week we had fun with yet another completely engaging math lesson - firing cotton ball "frogs" from paper clip launchers, then tracking the absolute and linear distances they traveled. While this way of teaching about distance was both fun and new to me, what I really appreciated about last week's class was learning how to use tangrams. I'd never worked with them before and knew nothing about them. In class, we used a set of tangrams to create a giraffe figure, then tried to construct a giraffe twice the size with multiple sets. This was not easy!

As I mentioned above, I'd never used tangrams before this class, and one question I have is about other classroom applications. They seem to do a good job of fostering spatial thinking. Do they have any applications at the 4th grade level? I'm wondering about a use that might help my main placement kids remember geometric shapes and their properties. Since the tangrams are geometric shapes they've studied, it might be a useful way to use them in my classroom.

The implications for classroom practice that I see are more engaging ways to get kids to connect to math. The exercise of doubling the size of the giraffe was very challenging -- my group never got there, in fact -- but was also very engrossing, no one wanted to stop trying!