5 Piece Pentomino Square Puzzle

This pentomino square puzzle will test your spatial reasoning skills as you work to assemble the five pentominoes into the provided square grid.

Previously, I have shared a collection of 13 free printable pentominoes challenges. This individual puzzle is substantially easier than those challenges and the animal shaped pentomino puzzles I have shared here on the blog. This would make a great first introduction to pentominoes for students!

Instructions

Place the five provided pentomino pieces on the provided grid to form a 5×5 square. The pentomino pieces may be rotated or flipped, but the pieces may not overlap one another.

Puzzle Source

This puzzle is from a collection of 199 different mathematical puzzles offered as a free download from IREM de Lyon. This is a top-notch puzzle resource if you speak French.

I sadly do not speak French, but I was able to use the Google Translate app to translate quite a few of the puzzle instructions in order to use them in my classroom. Other puzzles I typed up from this same resource is the U Sums Puzzle, Magic H Puzzle, Lines of 3 Puzzle, 4 x 4 Checkered Square Puzzle, Equal Sums Puzzle, Square Sums Puzzle, Product Square Puzzle, and the popular Loops Puzzle.

This specific puzzle is #1 – Les cinq pièces vertes.

Printing and Prepping the Puzzle

This puzzle is designed to print on letter-sized 8.5 x 11 inch paper, but you could easily scale it to print on A4 paper as well.

When printed on letter-sized paper, you have the option of cutting out the five pentomino pieces for students to use when solving the puzzle or using pentomino pieces from a set of plastic pentominoes made up of 1 inch squares.

If you are printing the pentomino pieces, I suggest printing on a heavier weight of paper such as cardstock for durability. You can also print on a regular weight paper such as Astrobrights and laminate it before cutting out the pieces.

I used this puzzle last year in my classroom as one of my Puzzles of the Week. I prepared several copies of the puzzle and hung it on my dry erase board using a Charles Leonard magnetic pocket which I picked up from Amazon. They have been a real game-changer in my classroom organization!