Educating Risa

While not as popular as it’s cousin sudoku at present, kakuro puzzles have been around for years. They are also known by the name “cross sums”, as they are a mathematical version of the crossword puzzle. I remember enjoying them as a kid—and more complicated ones even now as an adult—and thought I’d give it a go with Daegan to give him another option when it came to practicing his math facts. I found this great site with simple, kid-friendly kakuro puzzles, and printed the first puzzle on paper. I then made the puzzle even easier by consulting the solution and filling in all 1s (ones) to help Daegan get started (figuring out where to start is often the most difficult part of a kakuro puzzle). The puzzles from this site print beautifully for young kids, with large boxes to write in, or, as we did, to use a number token on.

Here is Daegan just getting started:

And here he the puzzle partway through. If you look at the top left corner, you’ll see how kakuro puzzles work. When he started the puzzle, just the 1 was filled in in the corner square. Daegan then was able to solve the square below the 1, as that column adds to 3. So he plunked down a 2. He was also able to solve across from the 1, as the sum is 6, so in went the 5. Working across from the 2, he was able to figure out that a 9 was needed (2+9=11), and now he had enough information to solve the column of three squares that sum to 20. (5+9=14, 20-14=6).

Now look again at the picture above and notice the top right-hand corner. I asked Daegan which square he wanted to solve next, and at first he wanted to continue on under the 6-7-1 and solve the three digits that sum to 14. He quickly realized this would be too difficult, and looked for another area of the puzzle to work on. He pointed to a square in the top right, and then solved it:

He went on to solve the entire puzzle without too much difficulty—start to finish he took about 10 minutes—and I asked him what he thought of  kakuro puzzles. Daegan said, “This was funner because it was more challenging and took longer to solve (than Math-U-See).” When asked how it compared with magic squares, he said, “I liked it about the same as magic squares.” We’ll be doing more of both!