There are four books in the series. Each has 100 activities, one per page, easiest first, and each has an age range on the cover: Mazes For Little Explorers is for ages 3 to 5, and Patterns, Sorting & Sequencing, Earth, Sky & Space and Coding & Engineering are for ages 4 to 6. Those ranges are the honest ones rather than the widest ones. This page is about what is inside them: which book fits a child of a given age, where in the book to start, and when to move on.
The short answer
| Age | The book | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Mazes | Level 1, mazes 1 to 10 |
| 4 | Mazes, plus whichever of the other three is about a thing the child already asks about | Mazes at Level 2; the other book at Unit A |
| 5 | Any of the four | Mazes at Level 4; the others at Unit B or C |
| 6 | Patterns, Earth, Sky & Space, or Coding; Mazes only if they have done the earlier levels | Unit D onward; Mazes at Level 5 |
The rest of this page says why.
Age three: the maze book, and the first two levels of it
At three, most children draw from the shoulder with a fisted or digital-pronate grasp. The arm moves and the fingers do not steer yet, so the task that suits the hand is holding a line inside a wide boundary, and that is exactly what the first ten mazes are: a single channel 0.55 inches wide, no branches, no dead ends, an animal at one end and the thing it wants at the other. Level 2, mazes 11 to 20, adds one dead end per maze, which is the first real choice. A three-year-old can work those two levels for months, and the book is built so they can stop there and come back.
Use a fat crayon rather than a pencil. It suits the grasp they have and it does not snap.
The other three books do not list from three, and we do not blur that line to widen the audience. The first unit of the pattern book is matching and odd-one-out, which many three-year-olds can do, but the other 84 pages ask for sorting by two rules, ordering by size, and finding the unit of a pattern, and a book is listed by what the whole of it asks. Writing a code, which is the middle of the coding book, is not a three-year-old's task at all.
Age four: mazes with a choice, and one subject
The grasp is moving toward a static tripod and the child can start looking ahead of the pencil, which is what turns a channel into a maze. Levels 2 and 3, mazes 11 to 40, are 3×3 up to 5×5 grids with one or two junctions and a corridor that narrows from 0.45 to 0.38 inches. A wrong turn costs a couple of inches of backtracking. Watch for the child hitting the dead end and looking up at you. That look is the activity working. Say nothing.
Four is also where the three science books open, and they do not depend on each other, so pick the one about a thing the child already asks about. That interest beats any order we could suggest. In each of them, Unit A is the place to start at four:
- Patterns. Unit A, same and different, then Unit B, sorting by one rule. Nearly every four-year-old can copy and extend an AB pattern, which is where Unit D begins, so it is fine to jump there once the sorting pages are done.
- Earth, Sky & Space. Unit A, day and night, then Unit B, weather, which ends with recording what you saw each day for a week. That is the first data work most children ever do.
- Coding. Unit A puts everyday actions in order, putting on shoes, brushing teeth, and asks what happens if you do them the wrong way round. Unit B is reading a code somebody else wrote and tracing where it goes. Reading comes before writing, the same as with text.
Age five: dead ends, units of three, and writing a code
Five-year-olds are moving to a dynamic tripod grasp and can copy a square with deliberate corners. Level 4 of the maze book, mazes 41 to 65, is 6×6 and 7×7 grids with real dead ends, and this is the age at which noticing you are stuck and going back becomes teachable rather than just frustrating. The dead ends are short on purpose. A dead end four squares deep teaches backtracking; a dead end fourteen squares deep teaches that mazes are unfair.
In the other three books, five is the middle of the ramp:
- Patterns. ABC and AAB patterns in Unit D. AAB is the first difficult step, because a child working from "it goes one, then the other" has to abandon that idea and find the unit instead. Sorting by two attributes at once, in Unit B, and ordering a set by size, in Unit C, both belong here too.
- Earth, Sky & Space. Unit E, the moon and stars, and Unit F, the planets. The eight planets in order is the kind of thing a five-year-old memorizes as a chant without effort, and the line-up in the book is drawn at true relative size so the chant is attached to an honest picture.
- Coding. Unit C is the child writing the code for a path that is already drawn, which is the first time they have written instructions for someone else. Unit D is loops: the same arrow four times, then the short way to write it. A loop at this age is a shortcut, and children like shortcuts.
Age six: long paths, growing patterns, and finding the bug
By six most children can hold a line in a channel under a third of an inch, plan several moves ahead, and recover from a wrong turn without help. Level 5 of the maze book, mazes 66 to 100, is 8×8 up to 11×11 grids, with the longest solution paths in the book. Maze 100 has 121 cells and 17 dead ends.
The maze book says 3 to 5 on the cover because its first 40 mazes are below a six-year-old, and a book that is 40 percent too easy is not one we would tell you to buy for that child. If they have already worked the earlier levels, Level 5 is 35 mazes that are still fair at six. If they have never done a maze, start them at Level 4 and expect them to move quickly.
The three science books have their hardest units left for six:
- Patterns. AABB and growing patterns, where the rule is a change applied each time rather than a repeat, then Unit E, sequencing events in time, Unit F, shapes, position and symmetry, and the four Unit G pages that combine everything before them.
- Earth, Sky & Space. The whole book. Unit G, young scientist, is observing, using tools, and taking care of the Earth.
- Coding. Unit E, conditions, where the child draws both paths of an if. Unit F, debugging, where a code is given that does not work and exactly one arrow is wrong. Unit G, the design process: build it, test it, make it better. Debugging is the unit that matters most and the one most curricula skip.
If you think in grades
The maze book is Preschool to Kindergarten. The other three are PreK to Grade 1. The activities in the pattern book were written against Head Start ELOF and Common Core Kindergarten math; the tags are in our notes, not printed on the child's page.
How to tell the level is right
Not by age. By what you see:
- They finish without hesitating anywhere. Too easy. The practice is fine, but the interest will not last. Move up a level or a unit.
- They pause, pick, sometimes get it wrong, back up, and finish. This is the right level. Stay here a while.
- They lose track of where they are, or stop and want you to point. Too hard. Drop a level and come back in two months.
Our rule when testing was that if more than one child in three needed an adult rescue on a page, the page moved up a level or got redesigned. So a child who needs rescuing on most pages is at the wrong level, and that is the book's fault, not theirs.
What every book has
100 activities, one per page, easiest first. An icon-first instruction a non-reader can follow, with the sentence under it for the adult. A three-line note for the grown-up on every page. A progress map the child colors in, answers at the back laid out so the child can check their own work, and a certificate page. The interior is black and white line art, so every page is also a coloring page. Each book is $9.99.