The first word problems a child meets are addition stories: two groups joined together, or a starting amount that grows. These free printable worksheets keep the numbers small on purpose, so the work is understanding the situation, not the adding.
If they get stuck
The answer key prints on a separate page.
Every problem is a short, concrete scene — friends arriving at a picnic, two kinds of things found on a walk — and the child's job is to notice that the two amounts get combined. The numbers stay friendly (single digits and small teens) because the difficulty of an early word problem should live in reading and picturing it, not in the arithmetic underneath. Amounts are written as numerals, 7 and 4 rather than seven and four, so a child can lift them straight off the page.
The answer key shows the whole number sentence, not just the total: 7 + 4 = 11 mushrooms. Seeing the equation written out is what teaches a child to turn their own stories into math, and the unit on the end — mushrooms, friends, berries — is a quiet reminder to label the answer rather than leave a bare number.
One question from a sheet like this one, worked a step at a time — with a sentence saying what just happened and why.
Addition word problems, step by step