This month's Puzzle Corner activity in one member of a family of challenging, multiple-solution, dissection puzzles. These puzzles are geometric in nature and many, like the one presented here, are modeled after tangrams, the best-known of the dissection puzzles. Like tangrams, students can put the five pieces of this puzzle together into a number of interesting shapes. As part of this activity, students are asked to use the five pieces to make interesting shapes and then make a record of them. After this warm-up, students are challenged to construct the shapes pictured at left and below and then make a record of these solutions. Students will soon find that some of these shapes, like the cross, are more difficult to construct than others.

This month's puzzle is available asa PDF file, to preserve print quality.

The Five-Piece Puzzle (265k)