Pentominoes are the shapes made by joining five unit squares edge-to-edge. They are the subject of many, many puzzles, some of which have substantial curricular value.
I wrote about them in Geometric Puzzles in the Classroom.
I share many puzzles in three (free) pentomino books, and many lessons in one (commercial) book: Working with Pentominoes.
You can use my Virtual Pentominoes to play online.
- An instructional unit: Pentomino Labs.
- Teacher Notes, including some alternatives and extensions
- Find the pentominoes (Polyomino Lessons, pp. 3-6)
- Three-Pentomino Puzzles
- Pentomino Rectangles (Working with Pentominoes, pp. 14-23)
- Pentomino Blowups (similar figures)
- One-inch graph paper (useful for pentomino puzzles)
Simultaneous Pentomino Rectangles
- Tiling with pentominoes is explored in Polyomino Lessons (pp. 18-33). This is done not with physical pentominoes, but on grid paper (or virtual grid paper.)
- See also: Tiling Rectangles with Pentominoes
- Laser cutter file
- If you have access to a laser cutter, you can make your own pentominoes. (The file was created by Eben LaPier.) The advantage of laser-cut pentominoes over the commercially available ones is that the pieces are not subdivided into squares. Thus, when you've solved a puzzle, you can see what you did. With the commercially available pentominoes, all you see is in a solved puzzle is its subdivision into squares, which is useless.
Pentomino Activities, Lessons and Puzzles is a classic from the 1980's, (going out of print, but possibly still available from mheducation.com, item # 0884883744).
Working with Pentominoes (from didax.com) — book and ebook which can be projected and includes onscreen manipulable pentominoes.