Riddles for kids
There are 5 cookies on the plate and you take 3 of them.
How many cookies do you have?
The answer is Three. You took three, so three are yours. The question follows the cookies in your hands, and nothing was eaten.
Read the question again and see whose cookies it is asking about.
Your fund drops 50 percent in March.
By what percent does it have to rise to get back to where it started?
The answer is 100 percent. Halving takes 100 down to 50. Climbing from 50 back to 100 is a gain of 50 on a base of 50, and that is 100 percent.
Put a number on the fund, halve it, and ask what the climb back is worth against that.
You put 120 dollars into a fund at 60 dollars a share, then another 120 at 30 a share.
What did you pay per share on average, in dollars?
The answer is $40. The first 120 buys 2 shares and the second buys 4, so 240 dollars bought 6 shares. That is 40 dollars a share.
Count the shares each payment bought before you average anything.
You want a better than even chance that two people in a room share a birthday.
How many people do you need in the room?
The answer is 23 people. Twenty three people make 253 pairs, and the chance that all 253 pairs differ falls just below half. A match arrives 50.7 percent of the time.
Count the pairs of people in the room rather than the people themselves.
A cinema has 25 rows with 48 seats in each row.
25 × 48
How many seats does the room hold?
The answer is 1,200 seats. Twenty five is a hundred divided by four. Multiply 48 by 100 to get 4,800, then take a quarter of it, which is 1,200.
Round one factor up to a hundred, then undo the rounding with a division.
Riddles for kids with answers, small enough to check by counting. Read one out loud, let the guess happen, then look at the answer together.
Five cookies, and the question nobody hears
There are five cookies on a plate and you take three of them. How many cookies do you have?
Two is the answer most people give, and it counts the cookies left on the plate. The question follows the cookies in your hands, and nothing was eaten. You have three. Five cookies and you take three works on adults just as reliably as on children, which is the reason it is a good one to start with.
That is the whole shape of this topic. The numbers are tiny. The work is in hearing what the question is actually following.
Why do these catch grown-ups too?
Three things happen, and none of them are about being good or bad at sums.
The question follows one thing and the listener follows another. Cookies on the plate against cookies in your hand. Sheep that left against sheep that stayed. Once you notice the swap, the answer is already there.
Something shared gets counted several times. A family has four sisters, and each sister has exactly one brother. Eight children sounds right until you notice that the four sisters are describing the same boy from four different points of view. The family has five children. Four sisters and their brother is worth acting out with five people in a room.
Doubling runs away faster than anyone expects. One grain of rice on the first square, then double on every next square. By square 20 there are 524,288 grains, and each square holds more rice than every earlier square put together. Adding two each time would leave 39 grains on square 20, and that gap between adding and doubling is the surprise. One grain of rice, then double is the version you can hand to a child.
How to play these with a child
Five things make the difference between a good ten minutes and a quiz.
Read the riddle out loud, twice, before anyone answers. The second reading is where most of these come apart on their own. Reading it yourself also stops you from explaining before the child has had a turn.
Let the first answer stand for a moment. A quick wrong answer is the interesting part of the riddle, and the whole point is that it feels right. Repeat it back without a verdict, then read the question once more. Most children spot the swap themselves, and that moment is the thing worth having.
Ask what the question is following. Cookies in your hand or cookies on the plate. Sisters or brothers. Cuts or pieces. One question does the work of any explanation.
Put real objects on the table. Coins, cereal, buttons, anything countable. Seven coins worth fifty cents in fives and tens is much easier with seven actual coins: start with seven fives, which make 35, then swap one at a time and watch the total climb by 5 each swap. Three swaps gets you to 50. Seven coins that make fifty cents is built for a kitchen table.
Let the child check the answer rather than accepting it. Counting out four cups of oats into half cup bowls settles the question faster than any explanation. Every cup fills two bowls, so four cups fill eight. Dividing by a half asks how many halves fit inside, so the number goes up. Four cups of oats, half a cup each is one to do with an actual measuring cup.
Five to try at the kitchen table
A number that hides two clues. I am a two digit number, my tens digit is twice my ones digit, and my digits add to 9. The 9 splits into three equal shares of 3, so the digits are 6 and 3, and the number is 63. Thirty six has the right sum and the wrong order, so both clues have to be checked. The card is The number that hides two clues.
The digit that grows upside down. I am a single digit, and turned upside down I become 3 bigger. Six becomes nine, and nine is three more than six. There are only ten digits, so trying every one takes seconds. The card is The digit that grows upside down.
Mia and her brother. Mia is three times as old as her brother, who is 4 today. How old will Mia be when her brother turns 10? Mia is 12 now, eight years ahead. That gap never changes, so she is 18. Thirty keeps her three times older forever, and people do not age that way. The card is Mia is three times as old.
Cutting the log. Cutting a log into three pieces takes six seconds. How long for six pieces? Three pieces need two cuts, so one cut takes three seconds. Six pieces need five cuts, so 15 seconds. Cuts are always one fewer than pieces. The card is Cutting the log into six pieces.
The sweet jar. One handful holds 8 sweets and the jar looks about 20 handfuls full. Eight times 20 gives about 160 sweets. The handful is the measuring cup for the whole jar.
When the answer is a guess
The sweet jar question is a different kind, and it is worth pointing out to a child, because school questions rarely work this way. There is no exact answer available. There is a good method and a bad one.
The bad method is a round guess: a hundred, because a hundred sounds like a lot. The good method is to count one small part properly and then work out how many of those parts fit. That is one handful and how many handfuls, and it lands much closer than any guess. How full is the sweet jar accepts anything in range for exactly that reason.
The same move works on a car park, a crowd, a bookshelf and a bag of pasta. Count a bit, then scale it. It is probably the single most useful habit on this page.
Where the guessing goes wrong
Answering the other half. Two cookies instead of three. The sums are fine and they describe the wrong side of the situation.
Giving everyone their own one. Four sisters, four brothers. One shared brother is easy to see with people standing in a room and hard to see on paper.
Counting the pieces instead of the cuts. Six pieces looks like double the work of three pieces. It is five cuts against two.
Keeping a multiple fixed while time passes. Three times as old today does not stay three times as old. The gap in years is the part that holds still.
None of that means a child needs correcting in the moment. The riddle does the correcting on the second reading, and the adult job is mostly to slow the pace down and hand over the counting.
Read one, then let them try
The feed above runs these as cards, one riddle to a card. There is no timer, no score and no account, so a wrong answer costs nothing and nobody is keeping count.
If you would rather have a list to read together first, the blog has riddles with answers and a Halloween set. For the same shapes with grown up numbers, try Trick questions.