Tangram Puzzles: Four Shadows to Build

Four solid teal silhouettes sit on this 1st grade page, one to a card, each printed at exactly the size of a real tangram set. No seams are drawn, no piece is named and no outline is broken: the child sees only the shadow a finished build would cast. The sheet shown carries a fox, a broad arrow, a rectangle and a square. Every one of them takes all seven pieces, and the two plain shapes are not the easy ones, because a rectangle gives the eye no corners to start from.

Removing the seams turns the task from matching into searching. A child must now decide where the two large triangles go before anything else can be placed, and that single decision is most of the work. Because the shadows are true to size, a wrong placement shows immediately as an overhang, so the page corrects itself without a teacher standing over it. The fox has limbs that fix several pieces at once; the square and the rectangle hide everything and reward trial.

One sheet, four builds, seven pieces each. This page has no writing on it at all, so it works as a quiet station or a partner puzzle. Cut a set from the base page of the tangram family first, since the shadows here are printed to match that set exactly. If four shadows are too much at once, fold the sheet and give one row at a time.