Story Time
Little stories about counting. What happens, and how many end up?
For grown-ups
- How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Solving add-to, take-from and put-together story problems with numbers to 10.
Word problems are their own skill, not a by-product of arithmetic: the WWC practice guide rates teaching them STRONG on 18 studies, and fact fluency transfers to word problems only weakly. Starting at kindergarten with tiny numbers keeps the arithmetic out of the way so the structure is the only thing to work out.
- The underlying idea
- A story problem has a structure — something joins, something leaves, or two parts make a whole — and the structure is what is being learned.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- Kindergarten Unit 4: Understanding Addition and Subtraction · Kindergarten Unit 5: Composing and Decomposing Numbers to 10
- Sources
- Institute of Education Sciences / What Works Clearinghouse (2021) · Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · What Works Clearinghouse (2023) all references →
Related measured skills: ALPACA · Early number, ARF · Addition facts. What this means