Exploiting Tarsia puzzles

Image: Pinterest

Tarsia puzzles come in various shapes and sizes, but the basic idea is that students have to complete the overall shape by matching items, e.g. vocabulary, translations or questions and answers. As with dominoes, one edge has to be matched with another. Tarsia puzzle can be done individually in silence or in pairs or even groups, I suppose, but I'd avoid the latter. Judging by a Google image search, they seem to be used most commonly in maths classes.

I must admit that when I first came across Tarsia puzzles I was a little sceptical, as I tend to be with other cut-out jigsaw activities. Although they are quick to make, the cutting out bit takes time, so you might want to get a helper for that. You also need a good storage system for re-use.

Clare Seccombe has examples on her Lightbulb Languages site. This year I decided to add some to the Y7 page of my own site. I do think that they are generally more suited to beginners at primary level or Y7 of secondary school, but you could design them for older users as part of a teaching sequence.

So I have built up a nice little collection on the site, using maths teacher Mr Barton's free to use tarsiamaker.co.uk. Thank you!

To help me get my head around how the puzzles might be used, and the give some ideas to teachers out there, I put together a separate sheet, which I am copying in below.

Maybe you have used or could come up with other ideas. Do leave a comment!

(Clare left a link in the comments. See http://www.ideaseducation.co.uk/resources/Tarsia-ideas.pdf.)

Exploiting Tarsia puzzles

 

Practicalities

Cutting out the shapes takes time. Some teachers do them on card, laminate them for later use. Others get someone else to cut them out, or colour-code different sets so that don’t get mixed up. Keep them in envelopes for more than one use.

 

How to use them

You could use them at various points in a teaching sequence.

Pupils have to put the shapes together correctly to form the final shape. They work a bit like dominoes therefore. Pupils could do this individually or in pairs. If they do it in pairs there is less cutting up to do!

Once the puzzles are completed, you could display the solution, then use the sentences as the basis for further activities, for example:

 

·         Choral repetition (e.g. with back-chaining, whispering).

·         Dictation.

·         Delayed dictation (say a sentence, leave several seconds, then pupils write it down).

·         Gapped dictation.

·         Delayed copying (same principle as delayed dictation).

·         Oral or written translation from memory.

·         A ‘sentence chaos’ game.

·         ‘Spot the error’ – read sentences with a deliberate error. Pupils must identify it.

·         ‘Complete my sentence’ – start a sentence which pupils must complete orally or in writing.

·         ‘Translate-transcribe’ – give a sentence in English which pupils write down in French.

·         ‘Last one to speak loses’. In pairs pupils must recall French sentences in turn. The first one who cannot recall a sentence is the loser.

·         ‘Running dictation’. Display some sentences from the puzzle around the room. In pairs, one pupil has to ‘fetch’ a sentence, return to their partner and dictate it, as the other partner writes it down.

·         ‘Mind reader’. Think of a sentence which the class must guess. You could make this a team game.