Picture Clue Logic Puzzles: Cross Out and Find

No clue on this first-grade vehicles page is a sentence. Each clue is a name in a box and, beside it, a picture inside a circle: a big orange cross over the picture means that child does not have it, a plain ring means the child does. On this print the first puzzle has Ben with a crossed-out plane and Mia with a ringed car, the second has Anna crossed out twice, for the submarine and the rocket, and Lily crossed out for the submarine. To the right sits a three-by-three grid with names and pictures, and below it the three answer strips to circle in.

A first grader can reason about who has what long before reading a sentence like the child with the boat is not Emma, and this face removes the reading so the reasoning shows on its own. The two pictograms are the whole vocabulary: cross means no, ring means yes, and they are the same marks the child makes on the grid. Every page shows both, so the yes move gets practiced as well as the elimination. Two or three clues is enough on a three-by-three grid, and a child who thinks a clue is missing has usually not yet used the row-and-column rule.

Print in color, since the vehicles have to be told apart at a glance, on one portrait sheet. Read the legend aloud, cross means does not have, ring means has, and then let the child go. The three clues, one answer page at second grade is the same grid with sentence clues, and the true or false page reads a finished grid. Picture sudoku is a different family: rows and columns, no children, no clues.