Fill in the Blank Story

Three short stories sit on this 2nd grade page, each of three sentences and each with a strip of three pictures above it. A bank of nine words runs across the top: dog, owl, turtle, rabbit, kite, airplane, rocket, duck and fox. There are nine blanks in all and nine words, so every word is used exactly once across the whole page. The picture strips are shuffled: the three pictures above a story are its three answers, but not in the order the sentences ask for them.

Shuffling the strip is the design decision that makes this a reading page rather than a copying one. A child cannot take the first picture for the first blank; they have to read each sentence and decide which of the three it is describing — which one blasts off into space, which one is flown on a hill. Because the bank is shared across all three stories, a word spent on the wrong story goes missing later, so the page checks itself.

One sheet, three stories, nine blanks. It is the longest read in the cloze family and the only one where the sentences of a card belong together, so a child who fills them in order gets a small narrative back. Use it after the single-sentence faces, and read the whole story aloud before any word is written — the instruction asks for exactly that.