Where Does the Piece Go?

An almost empty hundreds chart fills the top of this 1st grade page. Only its edges are printed: 1 to 10 across the top row and 11, 21, 31 down to 91 down the left column, with eighty-one blank cells between them. Under the chart lie four puzzle pieces, every cell already numbered — a plus with 38 at its centre, an S of 16, 25, 26, 35, a T carrying 24 and 32 to 34, and an L reading 64, 65, 66 down to 84. The child reads each piece, works out where it sits on the chart, and writes its numbers into the right cells. Nothing else is written.

The task is the reverse of the base puzzle-pieces page. There the child builds numbers out from one; here the numbers are given and the child has to find the position, which means reading a number as a row and a column — 38 is in the row that starts with 31, in the eighth column — and then checking that the rest of the piece lands where it should. The printed edges are the guides: a child places 64 by sliding down the left column to 61 and across to the fourth cell. A piece put one row too high shows at once, because its other numbers stop fitting.

It prints on one sheet; a ruler helps keep the writing inside the small cells. Use this page after the base fill-in-the-numbers page, when the child can move on a piece and needs to see how the pieces relate to the whole chart. The jump-puzzles page takes the same moves off the chart altogether and turns them into arrow chains.