My youngest son visited the
Basilica Sagrada Familia, a Roman Catholic Church in Barcelona, Spain and brought this pattern back for me as a gift. Having done a lot of these types of puzzles, it didn’t take me long to figure out the all rows, columns, and diagonals add to 33. It just so happens that 33 is the age of Jesus when he died.
The second and third columns are interesting. Notice how they both have the numbers ‘14’ and ‘10’. The second column includes ‘7’ and ‘2’. The third column includes ‘6’ which is one less than ‘7’ and ‘3’ which is one more than ‘2’. Number sense tells us that both columns, therefore, should add to the same number – which they do.
Younger students can focus on number recognition, repeated numbers, finding the number that represents their age, etc.
