Thanksgiving Mystery Tangram Puzzle

This Thanksgiving Mystery Tangram Puzzle combines two favorite math activities into one. This printable Thanksgiving puzzle will have students both practicing plotting ordered pairs on the coordinate plane and solving a fun tangram puzzle using the resulting outline from the plotted ordered pairs.

Puzzle Inspiration

I was inspired to create this Thanksgiving-themed puzzle after seeing just how many teachers were excited to use my Halloween Mystery Tangram Puzzle that I shared last month in October.

Eventually, I would like to have an entire series of mystery tangram puzzles for each holiday during the school year. I’m currently working on a Christmas-themed mystery tangram puzzle at the moment.

How the Activity Works

Students begin the activity by connecting the dots formed by the provided list of ordered pairs.

As students connect the ordered pairs, the outline of a turkey will begin to be formed.

Once students complete the coordinate graphing part of the activity, they can either color in the resulting picture or jump straight to creating the design using tangrams. I didn’t feel like coloring in the entire turkey, but I did outline it with a bit of color to make it “pop” off the page a bit.

Now that the mystery Thanksgiving shape has been discovered, it’s time to pull out the tangrams! A class set of tangrams was one of the best purchases I made for my classroom during my first couple of years of teaching. There are so many activities you can use them for!

I sized the coordinate plane so that my plastic tangrams are the exact same size as the outline created by the ordered pairs.

Printing and Preparing the Activity

The first step to making sure that your sizing is 100% accurate is to make sure you print the PDF of the Thanksgiving Mystery Tangram Puzzle at 100% scale. Do not check the box that says “Fit” or “Shrink Oversized Pages.” This will result in your tangrams not fitting properly on the template.

Next, you need to make sure that you have the correct size of plastic tangrams. Like I said earlier, a class set of tangrams was one of my first purchases for my math classroom. I have used them for so many different activities over the years.

The large triangle in my tangrams (manufactured by Learning Resources) is exactly four inches across on its longest side.

If your tangrams are a smaller size, you can either scale the document to print at the correct size or you can just have students build with the tangrams on their desk instead of laying them on top of the coordinate plane template.

For example, if your largest tangram piece measures 3″ across, you would print the PDF file at 75% scale. If your largest tangram piece measures 3.5″ across, you would print the PDF file at 87.5% scale.

Looking for more Thanksgiving-themed math fun? Check out the Triangular Turkey Puzzle!