Match the Question to the Answer

Five questions stand on the left of this 1st grade page and five answers on the right, each answer carrying a picture beside its words. The questions on the sheet shown are how many meerkats Anna finds, what Ava draws, where Jack reads, who likes the coconut and when Eli sleeps; the answers are Zoe, at the river, the raspberry, at seven o'clock on a clock face, and three meerkats. The child draws a line from each question to the answer that fits it.

Five different question words appear once each, which makes the page a test of the words themselves rather than of the sentences around them: a child who knows that where wants a place can find at the river without reading past the first word. The answers are deliberately short and each is a different kind of thing — a name, a place, an object, a time, a number — so the question word alone is enough to sort them.

One sheet, five questions, five lines. No writing at all, which makes it a quick check after the highlighting page and a fair one for a child whose handwriting is slower than their reading. It is also the only face in the family where the question is given whole; on every other page the child supplies either the question word or the question itself.