Read and Check: True or False About the Picture Row

Nothing is circled in the picture row on this 1st grade read-and-do page, the true-or-false face; the row is only looked at. Eight toys sit across the top — a bicycle, a boat, a second bicycle, a sandbox, a truck, a robot, a second truck and a doll — and under them six statements each end in two chips, true and false. The third picture is the bicycle. There are four sandboxes in the row. The row starts with the bicycle. There are three trucks in the row. There are more than three boats in the row. The last picture is the doll. The child reads the statement, checks it against the row, and circles the chip that fits. Three of the six are true and three are false.

Judging a sentence is a different act from obeying one. In the other read-and-do pages the child does what the words say; here the words make a claim and the pictures decide whether it is right, which is the first step toward reading comprehension questions. The statements probe count (three trucks — there are two), position (the third picture, the last picture, starts with) and comparison (more than three boats), so a child cannot answer from the nouns alone. The teacher asks a child who marked false to say what would make it true — two trucks, not three — which shows whether the row was actually counted.

It prints on one sheet with large true and false chips that a first grader can circle without crowding. Keep this page for the end of the read-and-do sequence: the base page, the read-and-circle page and the two-step page all have the child marking the strip, and this one turns the same strip into evidence. It pairs with a short reading-comprehension page as the next step.