Owl Mystery Picture: Adding & subtracting to 30

A round brown owl with big yellow eyes, an orange beak and little ear tufts. The large eyes appear early, so children quickly guess who is watching them.

Children add and subtract with numbers up to 30 and cross ten along the way: 17 + 6, 26 − 8, 19 + 5, 30 − 12. Since every answer has to match a row on the grid, results never go past the height of the picture, and the bigger numbers appear mostly as the starting number in a subtraction, such as 27 − 9 or 24 − 7. That makes this topic particularly strong on subtracting across a ten from the twenties, which many children find harder than adding.