Pentominoes

Last year I read the book Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. It's an interesting children's book where the two main characters solve a mystery about a stolen piece of artwork. One of the characters is intrigued with patterns and puzzles, and he always carries around a set of pentominoes with him. After reading the book, I became intrigued with this mathematical puzzle. I ordered a classroom set, and I began exploring them at the beginning of this school year. I found out that pentominoes are a lot like tetris (for those of you who remember that very fun Nintendo game). You have 12 pieces, each consisting of 5 squares. Each piece is named by the alphabet letter it represents. You can arrange the 12 pieces to make a 6x10 rectangle, and there are over 2,000 different ways you can arrange the 6x10 rectangle. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. My daughter and I played with them every night for two weeks...no luck. My father-in-law was the only person in my family able to make the rectangle! So last week I introduced this puzzle to our class to see what they could figure out. The pentominoes proved just as challenging to our students as it did to me. This will be a mathematical puzzle that we will continue to explore all throughout the year. Here are a few pictures of our kids in action...

Pentominoes

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