Underground Maze: Help the Ant Through Its Tunnels

This page shows the ground cut open, like a slice through a garden. At the top, an ant stands on the grass by the green start circle. Below the grass, brown soil is layered in bands, and tunnels run through it on three levels, joined by short shafts that go straight up and down. Deep down in the far corner, a raspberry sits in a round room: that is where the ant wants to go. Other little rooms hold a worm, a centipede, a beetle and a spider, and some of them are at the end of tunnels that lead nowhere else.

The new idea here is up and down. The way to the raspberry does not simply go downhill; at some point the ant has to climb back up a shaft before it can go down again, and the shaft that looks like the quickest way down may stop in a dead end. Talking it through builds position words a first grader is using every day: above, below, down the shaft, along the middle tunnel, back up to the top. The line is drawn along the tunnels from the ant to the raspberry.

Print it as a PDF, use the screen version where the child drags through the tunnels and presses Check, or compare with the answer key, which shows the ant's way in colour. In the same family, the river maze is a gentler kindergarten page, and the town maze turns the problem into finding the shortest of several streets. These are picture mazes with a story; square-grid mazes, dot-to-dot and word sorting have their own pages.