The Five Triangle Puzzle: Composing and Decomposing
Beginning in first grade and continuing through the grades, the Common Core Math Standards emphasize composing and decomposing shapes. One way to give students experience with composing shapes is through put-together puzzles. Actually, working at put-together puzzles involves lots of composing and decomposing. Sometimes what we compose is a solution; sometimes it’s not. While the tangram puzzle is an obvious, well known example of such a puzzle, there are others that students will find interesting. One of my favorites is a puzzle made up of five triangles. In this post I want to tell you about this puzzle; I will give you a master so you can make a Five Triangle Puzzle for yourself. I’m then going to leave it for you to solve the puzzle, and finally, I’m going to come back to it in a later post to talk about the solutions. I’m hoping in the mean time to hear from you about how you thought about the puzzle and to hear about your solutions and anything you ...