Odd or Even? Count the Pictures in Pairs

Six long rows of vehicles fill this 1st grade page — trams, rockets, helicopters, submarines, ferries and jeeps on the sheet shown — with between eleven and eighteen pictures in each. Every row ends with one dashed box labelled pairs and the two words odd and even to circle. The child rings the pictures two at a time, writes how many rings they made, and then circles the word that fits what happened at the end of the row.

Ringing in twos is the physical version of the same argument the dot page makes with printed arrays, and the picture counts here are deliberately large: at eleven and above a child cannot see the parity, so the rings have to be drawn and the last one either closes or it does not. Three rows come out even and three odd. The box asks for the number of pairs rather than the total, which keeps the answer small and the counting honest.

One sheet, six rows, eighty-five pictures. It takes longer than the other 1st grade faces because every picture has to be ringed, so give it the time rather than the last ten minutes. This is the pairing face of the odd-and-even family and the one to use before the fair-share page, where the same idea gets two people to argue over.