Find 3 Big Differences: Bucket and Spade

Three differences, each of them big: this is the page to hand a child who has never compared two pictures before. The beach scene with the bucket and spade, the ball, the starfish and two chicks is drawn twice, one picture above the other, and only three things change in the lower one. On the copy shown the sun has become a moon, a cloud has grown and one chick is much bigger; small changes such as a rotated detail are kept off this kindergarten page on purpose, so that every difference is the size of a whole object.

Three is a count a four-year-old can hold in one hand, and the three large tick boxes beside the pictures match it. The child circles each change in the bottom picture and ticks a box, then looks back to check that three boxes are ticked and three rings drawn. The lesson is the method, slowly: look at one thing in the top picture, find it below, ask whether it is still the same, move on.

Print the PDF for the table, or open the tap screen on a tablet where each found difference lights up; the answer key rings the three changes with numbers 1 to 3. When three big ones come easily, the base page of the find-the-differences family offers five, and the pond page seven across two pairs. These pages compare two pictures of one scene; mirror drawing, colouring by number and odd-one-out puzzles have their own pages.