Kea & Rock and the Hungry Wind

for grown-ups · First Expedition · start here

The First Expedition · about 12 minutes · ages 7 and up (written for 7–10, with two trails: the main trail and the high route)

The big idea

This is your child's first expedition, and it teaches the tools everything else uses. A snack has gone missing, and finding it means learning to ask: what do I think happened? Where did that idea come from? How sure am I? What would we see if I were right? The mystery is small on purpose. The habits are the point.

What happens (spoilers, since you're a grown-up)

Kea (an overconfident mountain parrot) has lost a carefully buried snack and immediately blames a "hungry wind". Your child is recruited on the spot — "you're crew now" — and offers their own theory. Every theory has to say what evidence it predicts: wind means scattered crumbs, rolling means a trail, a visitor means tracks. None of it is there. What is there: tidy beak marks, and a second little hole nearby with the snack in it. The beak marks match exactly one beak at base camp. Kea moved the snack at dusk "for safekeeping" and forgot. Rock, a glacial boulder and the only witness, watched the whole thing and said nothing — because, famously: "Nobody asked."

Kea formally apologises to the wind ("Wind — I said things") and your child's Field Kit, used tool by tool along the way, becomes theirs.

The thinking your child practiced

• Asking the witness — the fastest tool in the kit was available the whole time. If your child thought to ask Rock early, the story rewards them; if not, the ending makes the lesson land without scolding.
• "What would we see if this were true?" — every theory makes a promise about evidence, and you check the promise, not the confidence.
• Saying it louder doesn't make it truer — Kea retells the wind theory three times, with growing certainty and no new evidence. Rock: "You have said it three times. It has not become more true."
• "I saw it myself" can still be wrong — Kea really did see the burial. The seeing was fine; the remembering failed. Memory is a source like any other, strong but not perfect.
• Changing your mind out loud — at the end your child says plainly what really happened, and revising after evidence is celebrated more than having guessed right at the start. (Guessing right at the start gets its own lesson: "Right AND checked. The best kind of right.")

Words your child may come home saying

Try it at home

Next time something goes missing in your house, run the crew's game before the search: everyone states a theory, tags where it came from (saw it? guessed it? worked it out?), and says what evidence their theory predicts. Then look. The one rule from the episode worth stealing: whoever changes their mind when the evidence turns up gets the credit, not whoever guessed right.

Talk about it afterwards

• "Rock knew the whole time. Was Rock being mean by not saying?" (No — and the follow-up is the episode's whole thesis: asking is a tool.)
• "Kea said 'I saw it myself' and Kea really had. So how was Kea still wrong?"
• "Have you ever been really sure about something you remembered, and it turned out differently?" (Sharing one of your own is worth ten lessons.)

For teachers

Twelve minutes, sized for a single session, and deliberately gentler than a topic episode — it exists to install the vocabulary (where-froms, the Sure-o-Meter, the Wonder Log) that later expeditions assume. Works read-aloud with younger children; nothing in the app assumes a solo reader. The high route (roughly ages 9–10) adds two short beats: confidence should track evidence, not repetition (did the needle move because we learned something, or because Kea got louder?), and memory as a strong-but- imperfect source. Both are good five-minute class discussions on their own.

Curious Kea · a game about how we know things · curiouskea.nz

Every expedition ends the same way for a grown-up: a home experiment, and something to talk about. Nothing here is homework. If your child wants to argue with the card, that is the point.