key pieces of information that somehow need to be put together to obtain the answer. Children (and adults too for that matter) will often not be able to absorb all the important information of a problem in one go. It will almost always be necessary to read a problem several times, both at the start and during working on it. During the solution process, children may find that they have to look back at the original question from time to time to make sure that they are on the right track. With younger children it is worth repeating the problem and then asking them to put the question in their own words. Older children might use a highlighter pen to mark and emphasise the most useful parts of the problem. Plya's second stage of finding a strategy tends to suggest that it is a fairly simple matter to think of an appropriate strategy. However, there are certainly problems where children may find it necessary to play around with the information before they are able to think of a strategy that might produce a solution. This exploratory phase will also help them to understand the problem better and may make them aware of some piece of information that they had neglected after the first reading. Having explored the problem and decided on a plan of attack, the third problem-solving step, solve the problem , can be taken. Hopefully now the problem will be solved and an answer obtained. During this phase