Fact Families: The Missing Partner

Four houses stand on this Grade 1 page, and the facts underneath them have moved their gap. Each line reads something like 7 plus a box equals 12, or 12 minus a box equals 5: the result is printed at the end, and the number missing is the one in the middle. Using the three numbers on the roof, the child works out which partner belongs in each box — four facts per house, sixteen boxes in all, with every trio inside twenty.

Giving the child the roof and the results, but not the middle number, changes what the page actually tests. Instead of generating four facts from scratch, the child has to match: to look at 12 minus a box equals 5 and recognize which member of the trio is doing the work. That is much closer to how fact knowledge gets used in the wild, where a number is missing, the relationship is known, and the child reasons from what is in front of them. It also catches the child who has been copying roof numbers into the lines by position, without ever reading what the sentence says.

Print the PDF free and treat a wrong box as a conversation rather than a correction. Fact family houses to 20 is the version where the child produces every answer themselves, and missing number equations to 20 strips the houses away entirely and leaves the same reasoning standing bare.