Find the question

💡 How it plays and why it helps

Before a child can solve a story problem, they need to know what it asks. Find the question starts there. Each Pre-K story is short and read aloud: Sami has 5 carrots, Leah has one, they put them together. Nothing has to be counted. Instead, four questions appear, and your child taps the one that fits the story. A round has five stories, and every answer is checked with a short reason.

This is the quiet step under every word problem: separating what we already know from what we want to find. In these stories, things are put together, given away or kept, and the right question follows the action: how many in all, how many left, how many now. One choice is always off topic, a question about where someone lives, which helps a child notice that a math question asks how many.

The tempting wrong answer is how many Sami had at the start. It sounds sensible, but the story already said it. Ask, "Did the story tell us that already?" Then honor the listening: "You heard the whole story first."