Number Trivia Puzzles - A Great Back to School Middle School Math Activity!

Looking for a great activity for the first days or weeks back to school?  This cooperative puzzle gets kids working together and thinking about numbers,

I LOVE activities that can double as classroom decor!

This is one of my favorite activities for the beginning of the year.  I let my students work in pairs to cut the pieces out and match up the number with the description.  For example, 360 would line up with "the sum of the angles in a quadrilateral."  When the pieces are put together, the puzzle makes an animal!  I have made several different animals.  My classroom is decorated in animal print so I like to use the safari animals to display.  I use this animal trivia for math 7 and a more difficult version with math problems for my accelerated class.  You can find the puzzles here, here, and here.  You can try a free animal puzzle here.

I made this "bulletin board" (it's actually a poster in a window because I don't have any bulletin boards in my classroom) from Rise Over Run and it all looks fabulous together!!  I have to get creative with displaying work so I hung string across my (many) windows and used mini clothespins to attach the puzzles.  This actually works great for quickly and easily changing out student work.