Egg Tangram Fun

There are some days when we just fall into fantastic lessons. I love those days. And, yesterday was one. First off, I read a math themed post from Love2Learn2Day, about Easter egg symmetry. She also mentioned, and included a link to an Easter bunny tangram activity.

We usually try to sidestep all the bunnies, and eggs at Easter (just a weird personal preference), but the mention of the bunny tangram, reminded me that there is also an egg shaped tangram puzzle. And, although we won't tie it into Easter (though you easily could), it goes along perfectly with our current birding obsession, since the symmetrical pieces of the egg, break apart, to be reformed into more than fifty, fantastical birds.

I went right to work printing off a version of the puzzle from Puzzles.com, which includes the egg, ready to be cut into pieces, as well as nice big patterns for several birds. I found thirty more bird solutions for the egg tangram, at Mathlove.com, though they print smaller, making them trickier for younger children to match to big, puzzle pieces.

I glued six different colors of construction paper to flattened cereal boxes, and traced the puzzle over them...

...to cut a puzzle for each child, in a separate color, so they wouldn't get them mixed up. Interchanging the colored pieces, would give you nice Easter egg puzzles too, if you are so inclined, and make for some very colorful birds.

Speaking of colorful birds:

I'm not usually a huge fan of Dr. Seuss (another weird personal preference), but his Scrambled Eggs Super! was just too perfect a match for this activity, to pass up. In it, a young boy searches nests of the world, for the best eggs, to make the most amazing scramble ever. You can even find an old, animated version of the story, here, on DailyMotion.com.

And, if you really want to cap off the perfect egg/fantastical bird themed activity right, you'll pick up a package of those pre-cut, and printed Easter egg cookies, that are on sale everywhere, right now - or even better, cut your own cookie dough into egg shapes, so you can make the pieces bigger, and easier to handle - and slice them apart following the tangram pattern, from the sources above.

Then, let your children piece together their favorite, colorful bird...

...before baking.

It's great to be a homeschooler.