Stump the Grown-Up
Included in The Whole Shelf
Children spend most of their time being asked questions. This turns it around.
Forty cards, cut out and kept in a pocket or a tin. The child picks one, reads the question out loud, and the grown-up has to guess before the answer gets turned over. Then somebody keeps score.
The questions are the sort that sound easy until you try to answer them:
- Why do tree trunks grow round instead of square?
- Why does bread go hard when it's stale, but biscuits go soft?
- Why do onions make you cry?
- Why does ice float instead of sinking?
- Why is the sea blue when water from a tap is clear?
Every answer is on the back of its own card — short enough for a child to read aloud, and correct without being simplified into something untrue. Where scientists genuinely aren't certain, the card says so. That's a better lesson than a confident wrong answer.
There are blank cards at the back for questions of their own, and a best-of-ten scorecard for settling it properly.
These are questions about the things this book explores — the everyday world, plants, weather, water, light. They stand on their own, so nobody has to go hunting through the book mid-game.
What you get: 40 cards across 12 printable sheets · A4 · instant digital download · yours to keep. Print double-sided, flipping on the long edge, and the answers land on the back of the right cards. Instructions included.
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