A Tangram Master

Warlord’s Puzzle by Virginia Pilegard/Nicolas Debon was recommended a couple of weeks ago by Almost Unschoolers, and I thought that the book was too interesting to miss. It also went well with our current theme of learning about China and Chinese folklore through a wonderful fiction book by Grace Lin Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. Anna was quite interested in the story and immediately exclaimed, This is about our puzzle on the fridge! Our magnetic fridge tangram is older than our daughter, and I tried to get her interested in them before. In fact, looking at my blog I discovered two early attempts here and here. Alas, it was too early, but this time she picked up the important part about making a square – the straight line from the two big triangles must continue down. Once she figured it out, she was able to put together a square easily and repeated this feat in the evening with our fridge puzzle. We also did some puzzles from Three Pigs, One Wolf, Seven Magic Shapes by Grace Maccarone – a hilarious tangram take on Three Pigs. The tangrams in that book were presented with shape lines in, so it was more “follow instructions” exercise. I hope we will do more tangram fun later this week – after all, we have a whole book full of them that came with a beautiful wooden set.