Food is a wonderful manipulative to use in the teaching of many subjects.
We discussed dominoes and then noted that a pentominoe was a figure formed by connecting five squares so that each square shares a common side with at least one other square. I next instructed the students to try to find all possible pentominoes, that is, all the ways of arranging five equal sized squares according to our rule. Students were given five Cheezeits and asked to form as many shapes as they could. We also discussed the need to be sure that two figures were really different. With all of these conditions, students were now ready to work to find all twelve of the pentominoes.