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Shadow Tangram Challenge Cards
Each card shows only a solid black shadow, with no name and no piece lines, so kids have to guess what it is before they build it. The matching answer card reveals the name and the colored seven-piece solution.
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Shadow Tangram Challenge Cards turns each tangram puzzle into a guessing game. A challenge card shows one solid black shape and nothing else. There’s no name, no color and no line where one piece meets the next, so the player first has to work out what the shape is, then fill it with all seven pieces.
What’s on a challenge card, and what’s on the answer
The challenge side gives the number, the level stars and a small category tag at the top, such as land animal or alphabet, with “Guess the shape” printed under the shadow. Seventeen cards also carry a one-line hint, like “It hops and carries a baby in a pouch.” The answer card for the same number shows the name in capitals and the build in color, so you can see where every triangle, the square and the parallelogram went.
The game’s rules are short: use all seven pieces, keep them flat and touching without overlapping, and turn or flip any piece you like.
100 shadows, four levels, seven kinds of shape
The challenges run from easiest to hardest instead of by topic, and each level mixes the categories. Level 1 starts with shapes like a jet, a hammer and the letter V. Level 4 ends with a seahorse, a helicopter and an eagle.
| Category | Shapes |
|---|---|
| Land animals | 20, including an elephant, a giraffe, a kangaroo and a fox |
| Birds | 12, from a parrot and an ostrich to a penguin and a flamingo |
| Sea animals | 12, such as a starfish, a lobster, a stingray and a sea turtle |
| Numbers | 10, every digit from 0 to 9 |
| Transportation | 10, among them a hot air balloon, a submarine and a rocket |
| Objects | 10, like a crown, a teapot and a candle |
| Alphabet | 26, one for each letter |
Scoring and bonus games
Warm-up shadows score 1 point, Explorer 2, Puzzle Master 3 and Shadow Expert 4, and the score sheet totals out of 250. The bonus pages add five more ways to play: picking the right shadow to answer a question, matching color builds to their shadows, spotting the odd one out in a row, rebuilding a design after looking at it for ten seconds, and a speed round against the clock. A last page has kids design their own shadow for someone else to solve.
Which file to print
The 134-page book keeps everything in one place, with the challenges grouped into chapters by category and a 9-page answer key at the back. For a card game, print the challenge cards and the full-page answer cards from the separate files, or use the print-saver file, which fits four cards on a page. Its nine-to-a-page sheets draw the answers as line drawings. Challenge pages are mostly black shapes on light paper. No tangram set? Print the cut-out page at 100% and cut the 150 mm square into its seven pieces, ideally on card stock.
