Mixed Problems: Three Stories, and You Decide What Each Asks

Three cards fit on this 3rd grade word-problems page rather than the usual two, and each one is a different kind of problem. Leo sees 3 rows of 4 legos, drawn in three outlined boxes, and the total is wanted; Mia shares 18 skateboards equally among 6 friends, pictured above six empty dashed boxes to deal into; and 18 cars lie in one loose row with no boxes while Leo makes groups of 6. The toys change, the layout of each picture changes, and the child has to read before working. Dot grid, dashed answer box and answer line on every card.

This is the page that tests the reading rather than the arithmetic. The three story shapes are the ones the family has taught separately, equal groups to a total, a total shared into a known number of groups, and a total broken into groups of a known size, and here they arrive in one place with nothing announcing which is which. The pictures still help, but they help only after the child has understood the sentence, since the six empty boxes on the second card mean nothing until the story has explained what goes in them. The last two stories both start from 18, which stops a child guessing the operation from the size of the number.

Print the PDF free and use it as the check at the end of the unit, not the introduction. Ask for one sentence of explanation per card, in the child's own words, before the working; that sentence is where a wrong operation shows itself while it can still be fixed. If one type keeps going astray, its single-type page is the place to go back to. Multiply and group is the two-card version of this same idea, and the arrays multiplication page is where equal groups first become rows and columns.