This is a bundle of story puzzles or pre-readers (or young kids).
The idea is simple.
- Every puzzle is a story told by 5–7 different illustrations, which you must cut out.
- The story has a clear “cause and effect” that puzzlers need to figure out! Something happened, which meant this other thing happened, which caused this ending to the story. Example: you left ice cream out in the sun, now it melted.
- You’ve solved the puzzle if you can place the illustrations on the timeline in the correct order.
It’s essentially a full version of our “Timeline Task” formula found in earlier (teaching) materials. Some other improvements we’ve made are …
- To allow easy answer checks, placing the images in the right order also spells a simple and related word.
- The puzzles are color-coded, so you always know which images/story belonged to which task.
- We’ve added the actual written story (per puzzle) too, which you can read to the players as confirmation, or which slightly older readers can try to read themselves for practice.
They’re a great textless way to get used to stories and have fun thinking about common situations and their consequences. For more practice with stories, and considering consequences of actions, it’s of course best to just read as many stories as possible and experience many different things in the real world.
And yes, Cows & Effox is just a bad pun on Cause & Effect. We’re not sorry.
REMARK! As you can see in the image gallery, the illustrations are given in a random order to prevent the player(s) from already seeing the right answer before they start cutting.
UPDATE! We added a 15th puzzle at the end! And we gave those final two puzzles bigger tiles. (Because they have more tiles/scenes to fit on the same timeline, they used to be slightly smaller than the early puzzles, perhaps too small.)
Product Contents
Below is a summary of this product's contents. The actual product might have even more inside, but never less.
- Front Page explaining how it works and how to play
- 14 pages with a story puzzle each (increasing in difficulty)