Pentominoes Pig Puzzle

This pentominoes pig puzzle is the latest addition to my growing collection of free printable pentominoes puzzles that I created for my students and am sharing with you to use in your own classroom.

For the month of October, I challenged my students to complete the Jack-o-lantern pentominoes puzzle. It turned out to be a very tricky one! I received emails from many of you looking for the solution because your students were unable to solve it.

My plan was to switch back to my usual animal-themed pentominoes puzzles when November rolled around. What I didn’t plan on was going into labor on my own naturally over a week before my scheduled induction date and twelve days before my actual due date.

Yes, if you don’t subscribe to my weekly email newsletter or follow me on twitter or instagram, you might have missed the fact that Baby Carter #2 joined our family in early November. He is sweet and snuggly and absolutely perfect. It’s also making me realize just how far removed from being a baby that our 3.5 year old toddler is.

So, my students will still be tackling this pentominoes pig puzzle, but it will be in January when I return from maternity leave instead of November like I planned. I actually took time a few weeks ago to prep and print several different new pentominoes puzzles, so I will likely be sharing those with you in the coming weeks.

Don’t worry. I will be taking plenty of time to soak in all the baby snuggles!

I ran across this pig shaped pentominoes puzzle in Jon Millington’s Pentominoes: Puzzle shapes to make you think which was published by Tarquin in 1987. It was listed as part of a Pentazoo puzzle challenge.

I was able to check out a copy of this book virtually from the Internet Archive’s Free Online Lending Library. You will need to make a free account to access the book.

This is the same book where I found the elephant pentominoes puzzle and the penguin pentominoes puzzle.

I printed this pentominoes pig puzzle on 11 x 17 cardstock (regular 11 x 17 copy paper would work just as well but you might want to laminate it for durability) since the plastic pentominoes I have in my classroom are made up of 1-inch squares. I wanted my students to be able to lay the pentominoes pieces directly over the elephant outline.

Students must build the pig using a standard set of 12 pentominoes.

If you don’t have a class set of plastic pentominoes, I do have a printable version of 1-inch pentominoes available to download 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.

I placed a set of pentominoes in a magnetic pocket below the puzzle on the dry erase board. I like this method of displaying pentominoes puzzles because students are able to easily grab the pocket of pentominoes and take them back to their desks.

Hint Cards

Want to give your students a hint? I have created four printable hint cards to help you do just that! You can download them at the bottom of this post.

Looking for more animals to create with pentominoes? I have also created a frog pentominoes puzzle.