Tangled Lines Puzzle: Whose Kite Is It?

On a windy hilltop, four animals stand at the bottom of the page, each by a numbered circle: a fox, a raccoon, a squirrel and a badger. Each one holds a long string. At the top of the sky fly three kites and a red balloon, with an empty box above each of them. The four strings cross and recross on the way up, so it is impossible to tell at a glance which animal holds which kite.

There are no choices to make on this page and no dead ends; every string goes somewhere. The whole skill is following one line through each crossing without jumping onto another one. That is visual tracking, the same eye work a reader uses to stay on one line of print. Children usually do best with a finger on the string, moving slowly through every crossing. When the string reaches a kite or the balloon, the animal's number goes in the box above it, so the finished page shows four answers at the top.

The page prints as a PDF, works as a screen version where the child drags along each string from its animal to its end, and comes with an answer key with every string drawn in its own colour and the boxes filled in. In the same family, the babies-and-mothers maze adds choices at the junctions, and the big jungle maze asks for planning a long way. These are picture mazes with a story; square-grid mazes, dot-to-dot and word sorting have their own pages.