30 Riddles for Kids: From Picture Riddles to Trick Questions

The riddle text in this round is written in hiragana. For five-year-olds who cannot read yet, an adult should read them aloud. The four pictures in each question belong to the same family (fruits, animals, vehicles and so on), so the clues in the riddle, not the look of the picture, decide the answer.

1. Question 1: An airplane flies with its wings spread and never flaps them. Trains, buses and ships cannot fly.
2. Question 2: An umbrella snaps open into a round roof over your head when you use it. A hat, gloves or boots never open into a roof.
3. Question 3: An apple is red and round and crunches when you bite it with the skin on. A banana is yellow and peeled, grapes are small purple berries, and a watermelon is green outside and you do not eat its rind.
4. Question 4: Cats have stiff whiskers and are good at catching mice. Rabbits have whiskers too, but they do not hunt mice.
5. Question 5: Scissors cut paper with two blades. A glue stick sticks, a pencil writes and a ruler helps you draw straight lines.
6. Question 6: A caterpillar grows into a butterfly, which flutters on its wings and sips nectar. Ants, snails and spiders have no wings.

These are for grades 1 to 3, once hiragana is easy to read. Reading aloud helps the clues sink in.

1. Question 1: Close your eyes and everything goes dark. Covering your ears, pinching your nose or shutting your mouth does not make things dark.
2. Question 2: The moon is so far away that it stays in the same direction as you walk, so it seems to follow you. The sun is not out at night, and rainbows and thunder do not follow anyone.
3. Question 3: A refrigerator is cool inside and keeps food from going bad. The others do not blow cool air when you open them.
4. Question 4: A bat hangs upside down by its feet to sleep and flies at night. Sparrows, swallows and crows are birds that are active in the daytime.
5. Question 5: You climb stairs one step at a time to reach the next floor. A floor, wall or ceiling is not something you climb.
6. Question 6: A pufferfish swallows water and swells into a ball when it is angry or startled. The other fish do not.

For grades 2 to 4: riddles that play with the sounds of Japanese. You hunt for a word hidden inside another word, drop a sound, add dots to a sound, or read a word backwards. They are easier to solve out loud.

1. Question 1: Tug of war is tsunahiki, and the first two sounds, tsu-na, spell tsuna, 'tuna'. Ham, egg and cheese are not hidden in it.
2. Question 2: Remove the last sound ra from kujira (whale) and you get kuji, a lottery draw. The other animals do not give a kuji.
3. Question 3: Kuri (chestnut) read backwards is ri-ku, 'land'. Kaki, nashi and imo make no word when reversed.
4. Question 4: Shiken (exam) with a dakuten on shi becomes jiken, 'incident'. The other words turn into nothing like that.
5. Question 5: Horizontal bar is te-tsu-bo-u, and tsubo, 'pot', hides in the middle. Kame, zaru and wan are not in the word.
6. Question 6: Kanji without its n is kaji, 'fire'. Ongaku, sansū and kakezan do not become 'fire' when you drop an n.

For grades 4 to 6: these make you think "huh?". The first answer that comes to mind is usually wrong. Enjoy the "ahh!" that follows the answer.

1. Question 1: Facing south, west is on your right hand and east is on your left. On a map east is on the right, which is why 'right' is the trap.
2. Question 2: When all three hands appear, every hand loses to another, so it is a draw.
3. Question 3: Adding 6 + 3 gives 9, but that counts the person twice. Subtract one and the line has 8 people.
4. Question 4: There are 4 gaps of 5 metres, and trees stand at both ends, so 4 + 1 = 5 trees. Answering 4 forgets the tree at the end.
5. Question 5: A coin does not remember earlier tosses, so heads and tails are equally likely again. Thinking 'tails must be due' is the trap.
6. Question 6: Compare decimals from the left-hand digit. 0.9 starts with 9, so it is the biggest. 0.12 and 0.099 have more digits but are smaller.

For grades 4 to 6: questions that need a little maths thinking, and a couple of school words. If you drop your assumptions and think it through, the maths riddles open up too.

1. Question 1: 5 × 4 = 20 counts every pair twice. Half of that, 10, is the answer.
2. Question 2: Seven can be made in 6 ways, more than any other total. Two and twelve can each be made in only one way.
3. Question 3: From shortest to tallest the order is Takuya, Hiroshi, Kenta, Masato. Masato is the tallest.
4. Question 4: 100 + 50 + 10 is 160 yen. You still need 10 yen more, so add a second 10 yen coin: 100 + 50 + 10 + 10 makes 4 coins.
5. Question 5: In Japanese, 'atama ga masshiro ni naru' (your head goes white) means your mind goes blank from shock.
6. Question 6: A piano, drum or recorder makes sound too, but it is the school chime that announces the start and end of every lesson.

• Read the picture riddles aloud yourself. For five-year-olds, read the riddle twice, slowly, then show the pictures. Pointing at the answer is enough.
• Give hints one at a time. If the answer does not come, ask "What colour?" or "How big?" and say the clues in the riddle out loud one by one. A child who works it out feels much prouder than one who is told.
• Say wordplay riddles out loud. Riddles that drop a sound, read backwards or add dots are easier to solve by ear than on paper. Writing the word down and tracing it with a finger also works.
• Treat getting tricked as part of the fun. When someone shouts "Eh?!", explain the reason right away. If everyone laughs about falling for it, older children join in happily.
• Mix ages in teams. With siblings or a mixed-age class, let the older child read the riddles to the younger one, and both enjoy it.
• Do not rush the thinking time. Younger children repeat the riddle in their head several times. Waiting a few seconds raises the number of right answers a lot.