Can Two Friends Share Fairly?

Six rows of zoo animals run down this 1st grade page — lemurs, giraffes, cheetahs, lions, wolves and monkeys on the sheet shown. Each row holds between three and eight animals, laid out five to a line, so the smallest piles fit on one line and the bigger ones spill onto a short second line beneath. Beside each pile sit two dashed boxes with a child's name over each, a smaller box marked left over, and the words odd and even to circle. The child deals them out one at a time to each friend, writes what each ends with, records the remainder, then circles the word that fits.

Fair sharing is where odd and even first mean something to a six-year-old, and the names over the boxes make a leftover awkward in the right way: one animal that cannot go to either child is a problem, not an abstraction. Every pile size from three to eight appears exactly once, three even and three not, so circling one word down the page wins half the rows.

One sheet, six shares, eighteen boxes. Where each pile breaks is worth a question of its own: three, four and five fit on a single line, so that line is the whole pile, while six, seven and eight strand one, two or three animals below. Reading only the short bottom line is right half the time and wrong half the time — ask a child what they actually looked at. Counters help if the pictures are still being worked out in the head.