Check out these resources for what students can learn from cutting out their own set of tans:
- Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, and Cathy Williams in their book, Mindset Mathematics: Visualizing and Investigating Big Ideas, Grade 1, use tangrams to teach about “putting shapes together and taking them apart” (composing and decomposing). Instructions for cutting out a set of tans from a square piece of paper are given on Page 42 in the chapter, “Big Idea 1: Building with and Talking about Shapes.” https://catalogimages.wiley.com/images/db/pdf/9781119358626.excerpt.pdf
- Andrejs Dunkels gives instructions for cutting out a set of tans, along with helping students discover attributes of the shapes and how the shapes relate to each other. “Making and Exploring Tangrams.” The Arithmetic Teacher, Vol. 37, No. 6, (February 1990), pp. 38-42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41193841
- Resource Area for Teaching’s “Tangram Tactics!” combines cutting out a set of tans with discovering fractions, decimals, and percents. https://raft.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/613-Tangram-Tactics.pdf