Back to School Grade Level Pentominoes Puzzles (K-9)

Welcome your new students to the first day of school with these fun and engaging grade level pentominoes puzzles for kindergarten through ninth grade students.

Did you know that I have an entire page dedicated to grade-level themed logic puzzles?

Puzzle Instructions

Use a standard set of 12 pentominoes to form the shape of the letters/numbers for the grade levels between kindergarten and 9th grade. Pieces may be flipped or rotated, but they may not overlap one another.

Puzzle Source

In 2025, I created the 7th grade pentominoes puzzle. It is a Math = Love original!

Soon, I was receiving messages from teachers of other grades who wanted to be able to do a similar activity with their grade level.

I tried to make other numbers (and K for kindergarten) myself, but all of my creations turned out to have no valid solutions. I was so excited when I discovered a set of letter and number puzzles that were created by Helmut Postl. The pentomino puzzles were originally posted on https://pentomino.classy.be/ which is ran by the brilliant Odette De Meulemeester in Belgium. However, the site is now transitioning domains to https://pentomino.meulomino.be/.

Printing and Prepping the Pentominoes Puzzles

11 x 17 Version

These grade level pentominoes puzzles are designed to print on 11 x 17 inch paper. I print all of my pentominoes puzzles on 11 x 17 cardstock for extra durability, but regular 11 x 17 copy paper will work just fine as well. (If you don’t have the ability to print on 11 x 17 paper, keep reading for an alternative printing option!)

WARNING: Make sure you print from Adobe Acrobat Reader on 100% scale. I tried printing these from a different PDF reader, and the squares did not print the correct size.

All of my pentominoes puzzles are sized for plastic pentominoes made up of 1-inch squares.

If you don’t have a class set of plastic pentominoes, I do have a printable version of 1-inch pentominoes available to save and print. Please be aware that you MUST allow students to turn over the printed pentominoes pieces in order to solve the puzzle! This is less obvious than with the plastic pentominoes pieces.

MATH = LOVE RECOMMENDS…

Amazon offers several brands of plastic pentominoes which I recommend. Each brand is sold in a tub containing six sets of twelve pentominoes each for a total of 72 pentomino pieces.

• Learning Resources Rainbow Pentominoes
• Learning Advantage (edxeducation) Pentominoes
• Didax Colorful Pentominoes

Want each student to have their own set of pentominoes? I also offer a set of free printable one-inch pentominoes pieces which can be laminated or printed on cardstock for durability.

Letter Sized Version

Since many teachers have told me that they do not have access to a copy machine or printer which prints on 11 x 17 paper, I have also uploaded a letter-sized version below which prints on 8.5 x 11 inch paper. You will have to trim and tape or glue the two letter-sized pages together to form the pentominoes puzzle board.

WARNING: Make sure you print from Adobe Acrobat Reader on 100% scale. I tried printing these from a different PDF reader, and the squares did not print the correct size.

Hints for Solving

Pentominoes puzzles can be quite tricky to solve. It’s not unusual to hear that students have worked on a puzzle for over 30+ minutes without finding a solution.

While some students can handle this level of perseverance, other students might benefit from a few hints in solving the puzzle. I have created a set of 4 printable hint cards that can be used with students to give them (or yourself!) a small piece of the solution.

I do find that the more experience students have with working pentominoes puzzles, the less they need the hints!

If I was using this as a first day of school activity, I would prepare several other small puzzles or activities that groups of students had to complete in order to “earn” each hint.

Similar Resources

This puzzle is just one of many printable pentominoes puzzles that I have created for my own classroom and am sharing with you!

Be sure to check out my entire collection of hands-on puzzles for the classroom.

Looking for more first day of school activities and puzzles for your classroom? I have a giant blog post dedicated to 40+ activities for the first week of school.

Here’s a few examples of some of these engaging activities for the beginning of the school year.

• 
  School Symbol Search Puzzle
• 
  Middle School Hidden Word Puzzle
• 
  Binder Area Division Logic Puzzles
• 
  High School Hidden Word Puzzle
• 
  Algebra Hidden Word Puzzle
• 
  Chemistry Area Division Logic Puzzles