A range of word problems for year 3, inspired by six beautiful picture books.

The Man whose Mother was a Pirate by Margaret Mahy

Toys in Space by Mini Grey

Peter Spier’s Circus

The Emperor of Absurdia by Chris Riddell

The Whisperer by Nick Butterworth

Harry and the Jaggedy Daggers by Jan Fearnley

Applying maths to a context to solve a problem is a challenge for many children. By immersing the children more in the context, or in this case picture book, the worded maths problems appear to have more relevance and are more enthusiastically accessed by the children.

Each picture book or picture has inspired 5 pages of problems. There are 6 closed problems on each page followed by a more open challenge. On each page many of the problems are based around a similar aspect of maths, such as multiplication or fractions. There is often at least one problem that is not part of this aspect so that the children need to think carefully about each problem – they can’t just do the same in each one!

The picture books and picture used to inspire over 200 worded problems to solve are the same ones that were used as a starting point for our maths and English resource Livello. They can be used to complement the Livello resource, or used entirely independently.