We recently took this book ‘Grandfather Tang’s Story’ by Ann Tompert out of the library and started to explore using tangrams to make pictures.The tanagram is an ancient Chinese puzzle. A square is cut up into seven pieces and then used to create silhouettes of a shape, that could be a person, a animal, an object. All seven pieces should be used, they should be touching each other, though not overlapping.

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Our little munchkins made all the tanagram pictures in the book. Here you can see a fox, a fish, a rabbit and a swan. Some of the silhouettes really do require a lot of imagination to see what the picture is meant to be. We created a rather dodgy looking lion and the fish was a little bizarre.

In the world of imagination anything can be anything so I think we will be okay!

Our little munchkins started to create some pictures of their own. We did cheat on some occasions by not using all seven pieces.Tanagrams can be a great educational tool. Have a look at this article from Parenting Science for more information and ideas.

Do you know of any ancient games or puzzels that are fun for children? Please comment below

Thanks for reading

Sarah 🙂