2025 Advent Calendar

1.

Jan, Nele, Paula, and Tim are good friends. The four children are looking forward to the festive season. After school, they want to do crafts, read, go ice skating, play, and bake together.

Today they are at Nele’s aunt’s house baking cookies. The dough has already been rolled out. Everyone grabs one of the fun animal cookie cutters: duck, owl,
goose, sheep, or mouse. Nele and Paula have each cut out 3 cookies, Nele’s aunt has cut out 2, and Tim has cut out 5. Which animal cookies has Jan cut out?

2.

"Look, the pyramid made of Dominosteine has fallen over,” says Nele.
The children look through the window of the bakery. They count 16 Dominosteine.
“The pyramid looked really nice,” recalls Jan.
“Yes,” agrees Paula, “four rows on top of each other, each row two Dominosteine
longer than the one above it, one on the left, one on the right.”
“And at the very top was a single Dominostein,” says Tim.

How many Dominosteine were in the bottom row?

3.

Paula, Jan, Nele, and Tim have built a slide in Paula’s uncle’s yard. The uncle comes into the yard with five baked apples. Whoever slides the furthest gets the
first baked apple. The uncle measures with his steps how far each of them slides:

Tim and Jan each slide 4 uncle steps.
Paula slides one step less.
The uncle slides 2 steps.
Nele slides 3 steps further than the uncle.

Who gets the first baked apple?

4.

Tim, Jan, Nele, and Paula baked a large gingerbread cake with Jan’s grandfather over the weekend. It is almost as big as the baking tray and shaped like a train. The grandmother is the first to taste it. She breaks off a small piece.

What does the piece that the grandmother broke off look like?

5.

Because today is Friday and tomorrow is St. Nicholas’ Day, Jan, Nele, and Tim are staying overnight at Paula’s house. In the evening, each of the four children cleans a boot. They then place it outside the door. Paula has also placed one of her doll’s little boots in the row.
Paula’s father asks, “Which boot is whose?”
The children answer with a riddle.
“Paula’s boot is smaller than Jan’s, but bigger than Tim’s.”
“Nele’s boot is bigger than Paula’s doll’s boot, but smaller than Tim’s.”

Who has the biggest boot?

6.

Today is St. Nicholas’ Day.
Nele, Jan, Tim, and Paula are curious. What might be in their St. Nicholas’ boots?
Each child found a small toy, nuts, and sweets.
Each child has 5 chocolate rings in their boot. The children place them all on a shared St. Nicholas’ plate.

How many chocolate rings are there on St. Nicholas’ plate?

7.

Paula, Jan, Tim, and Nele are meeting up with a few other children today to rehearse for the school’s Christmas party. The four friends have brought cinnamon stars for everyone. Mr Knapp is rehearsing with the children for the party.
“Who brought us all these cinnamon stars?” he asks. The children shout out wildly.
Jan says, “I brought more than 3.”
Nele says, “But Jan brought fewer than 5, and I brought one fewer than Jan.”
Tim says, “I brought twice as many as Nele.”
Paula says, “I brought 2 fewer than Tim.”

How many cinnamon stars did the four friends bring in total?

8.

Tim, Jan, Paula, and Nele are at the adventure playground.
When they take a break, Nele pulls a small bag full of fragrant Christmas almonds out of her rucksack.
There are 20 Christmas almonds in total.
Paula says, “I brought 2 fewer than Tim.”

“Great,” says Nele happily, “20 pieces! I’ll divide them up, and each of us will get the same amount.”
How many will each of them get?

9.

Jan found a recipe for marzipan in an old baking book at his grandmother’s house. Now Paula, Nele, and Tim want to make marzipan together
with Jan and his grandmother. First, they remove the brown peel from the almonds. Then they grind the almonds very finely. Next, they knead the ground almonds with icing sugar and spices. Finally, they add 15 drops of rose water.

Jan first tries it out with water. He wants to put 15 drops of water into a glass.
Nele counts the drops: one, two, three, four.
How many drops of water are still needed until there are 15?

10.

Yesterday, Nele, Paula, Jan, and Tim kneaded marzipan. Today, they are shaping it into marzipan potatoes. These are then rolled in cocoa powder. Now they look great. Nele is building a pyramid out of some of the marzipan potatoes.

For the bottom layer, Nele arranges the marzipan potatoes close together in a triangle. Then she places the second layer on top and finally one marzipan potato as the tip. How many marzipan potatoes does Nele need to build the pyramid?

11.

Paula, Nele, Jan, and Tim are going shopping together today to buy some ingredients for baking stollen.

They buy:
2 bags of flour,
1 bag of sugar,
5 packs of butter,
1 bottle of milk,
1 packet of icing sugar,
2 bags of raisins,
1 bag of almonds and
3 packets of candied lemon peel.

After Paula has paid, the four friends divide up the shopping. Everyone gets the same number of items in their rucksack.
How many items does each of them have to carry?

12.

Tim, Nele, Jan, and Paula have baked coconut macaroons. Now the macaroons are lying in a row on the kitchen table to cool down, 15 macaroons in total.
Tim coats every third macaroon in the row with chocolate. Paula puts a blob of sugar icing on the remaining macaroons, and Nele sprinkles colourful sprinkles on top of it. Jan counts how many coconut macaroons of each type there are.

How many of the 15 coconut macaroons have sugar icing and sprinkles at the end?

13.

This morning, Jan invited his friends over to bake. Paula wasn’t there. They want to bake something as a surprise because it’s Paula’s birthday today. Jan, Tim, and Nele baked a honey cake and cut it into hexagons. Tim writes letters on top with icing. And then they arrange the honey cakes into a diamond shape. Paula’s nickname, PAULI, can now be read on it, starting from the top and going down to the bottom.

How many different ways are there to read PAULI?

14.

Nele, Paula, Tim, Jan, and the twins Leo and Lena are going to the cinema together today. Nele loves watching fairy tales. Today they are showing ‘Snow White’. Everyone knows the film already, but they all like it. Tim has brought speculoos biscuits for everyone. There are 18 pieces in the
packet. Each child gets the same number.

How many speculoos biscuits does each of the 6 children get?

15.

Paula’s big sister Lucy baked gingerbread this year and built a gingerbread house out of it.
“But it still needs to be decorated,” says Nele.
Tim paints a picture. “Look, Lucy, this is how it should look,” he says.
“And we’ll see if Lucy decorated her gingerbread house exactly as Tim drew it,” suggests Jan.

How many differences are there between the drawing and the gingerbread house decorated by Lucy?

16.

Tim, Nele, Paul, and Jan have arranged to visit Jan’s grandparents. Each child has decorated a chocolate heart with icing and sprinkles. These are for the
grandparents. The grandparents live on the edge of the city park. Part of the park has been turned into a hedge maze. Each child starts the maze at a different entrance.

Who can find their way out of the maze and onto the wide path leading to the grandparents’ house?

17.

“Do you know how to make black and white biscuits?” asks Jan. Tim, Nele, and Paula shake their heads. Tim suggests asking his grandmother to show them
how. His grandmother has prepared the dough. She kneads cocoa into half of the dough. Now she shapes lots of light and dark sticks.
For the first layer, she places a light stick, then a dark stick, then another light stick, a dark stick, and another light stick close together.
She places a second layer on top of this layer: she now places a light stick on top of each dark stick and a dark stick on top of each light stick.
The third layer looks exactly like the first layer. Now the grandmother cuts off biscuits with a thin knife and places them on the baking tray.

What do these biscuits look like?

18.

Nele’s aunt Lydia bakes the most delicious vanilla crescent cookies. Every year she bakes lots of them. She then sends packets of vanilla crescent cookies to her friends as Christmas greetings. Nele, Tim, Jan, and Paula help her. They prepared the dough early in the morning. At 8:15 a.m., the first tray is put in the oven. And then one tray follows another. It is already 11:35 a.m. when the last tray is taken out of the oven.

“It’s almost lunchtime,” says Paula.
How long did the baking take?

19.

Who knows what Spitzbuben are?
Paula explains, “First, roll out the dough, then cut out circles and rings. Spread jam on each circular part and place a ring part on top.”
“Then the jam looks like an eye,” say Tim, Jan, and Nele, amused.
They lay the cookies out in a long row.

They use gooseberry jam for the 1st cookie, strawberry jam for the 2nd cookie, raspberry jam for the 3rd cookie, plum jam for the 4th cookie and currant jam for the 5th cookie. After that, they continue with gooseberry jam again, then strawberry jam, raspberry jam and so on.
Which jam is on the 13th cookie?

20.

Today, hazelnuts are being cracked. Tim’s aunt wants to bake hazelnut stars.
The nuts are for the hazelnut cream on top of the hazelnut stars.
Tim cracks 4 nuts.
Paula and Jan each crack 3 nuts.
Nele cracks as many nuts as Paula and Jan cracked together.

How many nuts do the 4 friends crack in total?

21.

Jan has decorated gingerbread cookies and is showing them to his friends.
“I like the ones with icing best,” says Tim. Paula and Nele agree.
“I like the white gingerbread cookie with 4 almonds in the corners and 3 hazelnuts in the middle best,” says Nele.
Which gingerbread cookie does Nele like best?

22.

Nele, Tim, Paula, and Jan are meeting up today to go ice skating. Jan has brought a large bag of Alphabet cookies for a little break. First, they eat all the letter cookies. After that, only the number cookies are left. But not all of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 can be found.

Which numbers are missing?

23.

“The apricot hearts will taste great,” says Paula.
“Don’t eat them yet!” calls Tim, “They’re not ready yet.”
Tim puts chocolate coating on the hearts, and Nele and Jan decorate each heart with 3 hazelnuts.

They still have 10 hazelnuts and lots of chocolate coating.
How many more apricot hearts can they decorate completely?

24. Now it’s finally Christmas Eve. A few days ago, Tim, Paula, Nele, and Jan started their holidays. Every day since the 1st of December, the 4 friends have had a little task to master. They worked together to solve the puzzles and then entered their answers in the answer grid.
They notice a special pattern.

24 Questions - 2025 Math Kangaroo Advent Calendar MINI

1.

Mia and Ole want to bake cookies. They found cookie cutters for the numbers 0 to 9 in the cupboard. They roll out the dough and cut out cookies. Each of the two children fills their own baking tray with cookie numbers.

“Look,” says Ole, “if I multiply all my numbers together, I get a beautiful number as a result.”
Mia thinks, “When I do the same, I always get 0. But when I add all my numbers together, I can get the same result. For the missing cookie number, I just have to cut out the correct number.”
Which number does Mia have to cut out last?

2.

Dominik made Dominosteine. It wasn’t easy to neatly layer the dough,
marzipan, and jam. In the end, Dominik coated some of the Dominosteine
with dark chocolate and some with white chocolate.
The finished Dominosteine go into a rectangular box:

Dominik wants to fill the box completely. The dark and white Dominosteine should always be arranged alternately.
How many Dominosteine of each type does Dominik still need to make?

3.

Linus and Paul are buying ingredients for baked apples. Their grandmother has given them a shopping list:

They now want to divide the shopping fairly. What Linus carries home should be just as heavy as what Paul carries home.
How much does each of them have to carry?

4.

Johanna baked a gingerbread locomotive. Just as she was about to start decorating it, an accident occurred: the gingerbread locomotive slipped off the baking tray and broke into six pieces. Five pieces are lying on the table:

The sixth piece has fallen on the floor. What does this piece look like?

5.

Deep in the forest, four little gnomes live under the roots of a strong tree.
During winter, they sit in their cave and wait for spring. But today is a special day. They polish their little shoes until they shine because tomorrow is
St. Nicholas’ Day. The gnomes place their polished shoes ‘neatly’ in front of the door. But Saint Nicholas will be surprised, because gnomes have a very different sense of order than we humans do. When they line up their shoes, they do it like this:
First, the first gnome puts his pair of shoes down. The second gnome pushes his pair of shoes between the shoes of the first gnome. Each of the next gnomes
pushes the row of shoes a little bit apart to create a gap. Then he places his shoes in this gap.
What could the row of shoes of the four gnomes look like?

6.

Julian and Aslan made themselves comfortable on St. Nicholas’ Day. They read fairy tales and snacked on chocolate rings that they found in their shoes.
Aslan finds it hard to resist chocolate rings. When he finished the last one, Julian said, “Did you know that you ate 4 times as many rings as I did? I counted them all!”
Of course, Aslan didn’t count them. Now he wants to find out how many he ate. At the beginning, there were 30 rings in the shoes.
How many of them did Aslan eat?

7.

Nico and Melina are snacking on cinnamon stars. “Did you know that cinnamon stars only have a few ingredients?” asks Melina. “Which ones?” Nico wants
to know. “Wait,” says Melina, “I’ll make a riddle for you.”
A short time later, she gives Nico a piece of paper with a star on it.
“All the ingredients are written in the star, one after the other,” explains Melina, “but they’re encrypted. You have to replace each letter with the letter
that stands two places further in the alphabet. For example, you have to replace a ‘C’ with an ‘E’. And a ‘Y’ with an ‘A’, because after Z it starts again with A.
Then you can read what the ingredients are.”

What is not an ingredient of cinnamon stars?

8.

Every year at the Christmas market, Mr Schlemmer sells the most delicious roasted almonds I know. He uses an old set of scales to weigh the almonds.
Unfortunately, he no longer has all of his balancing weights. Next to the scales, he only has these left:

I want to buy a small bag of 125 g of almonds. Since the 125 g weight is no longer available, Mr Schlemmer uses two other weights to weigh it. He places one on one side of the scales and the other on the other side. Which two weights did he use to balance the scales with the small bag of almonds?

9.

Maja buys a large piece of marzipan for 4 euros and 79 cents. She pays with a 5-euro note and receives 5 coins as change.
There are two possible sets of 5 coins that Maja could have received.
Which coin is definitely among them?

10.

Today, Maja shaped marzipan potatoes. They smell of almonds and rose water.
After rolling the marzipan potatoes in cocoa, they look simply wonderful.
Maja wants to impress her family and neatly arranges them in a pyramid.

For the bottom layer, Maja arranged the marzipan potatoes close together in a triangle. Then she placed the second and third layers on top and finally added one marzipan potato as a tip.
How many marzipan potatoes are there in Maja’s pyramid?

11.

Right after school, Kurt was supposed to take the 2:10 p.m. bus to the neighbouring village to bring his aunt a Christmas stollen. Kurt left home so early
that he was at the bus stop 5 minutes before the bus was due to leave. But Kurt forgot that his watch runs 10 minutes fast, so he still had plenty of time before
the bus arrived. And then, the bus was 5 minutes late!
“Finally,” Kurt shouted when the bus arrived, and he looked at his watch.
What time did his watch show at this moment?

12.

Chiara, Lasse, and Leonie want to bake coconut macaroons. However, they cannot agree on how many spoons of dough to use for each macaroon. So now they make three types of macaroons: small ones made with one spoon of dough, medium ones made with two spoons of dough, and large ones made
with three spoons of dough. First, they want to bake 3 macaroons of each type. Leonie carefully marks the spots where the macaroons should go on the baking paper. There should be exactly one macaroon of each type in each horizontal and vertical row.

quickly found this possibility. But is this the only one? How many possibilities are there?

13.

At the weekend, Mirja’s grandmother wants to bake moist honey cakes. Mirja gathers the ingredients. In the cupboard, she finds two jars of honey, a small one and a large one. Both are from the same beekeeper, as can be seen from the label.

Mirja knows that the beekeeper also sells jars that are one size larger. How many small hexagons are likely to be visible on the next largest jar?

14.

There is a strange custom in Speculatia during Advent. Every Sunday in Advent, freshly baked speculoos are eaten, and an Advent candle holder is
placed on the table:

When the candles are lit, everyone eats speculoos. And when the candles have burned down by exactly half their length, it’s over. The candles are blown out, and the table is cleared again. On the 1st Advent, only the 1st candle burns. On the 2nd Advent, the 1st and the 2nd candle burn. On the 3rd Advent, the 1st, the 2nd, and the 3rd candle burn. And on the 4th Advent, all 4 candles burn. When a candle has burned down completely, it is replaced with a new candle on the following Sunday of Advent before being lit. What will a candle holder in Speculatia look like on the 4th Advent when all the candles have been blown out?

15.

Together with his father, Lukas wants to build a gingerbread house. Lukas is still pondering the dimensions of the house, because the pieces have to fit together perfectly. To make things easier, he decided to build a model out of paper first. Lukas drew the two gable ends of the house and the rectangles for the two roof halves on some thicker squared paper:

Now, only the two long walls are still missing. How should Luke draw one of the long walls?

16.

Today, the five friends, Ella, Karl, Sebastian, Marie, and Nico, had a Christmas party at school. Everyone took home a small gift: a book, a little puzzle game,
a card game, a hand-knitted scarf, or a chocolate heart.
Ella got something to play with.
Karl got something to snack on.
Sebastian didn’t get the book.
Marie also got something to play with.
What did Nico get?

17.

Light and dark dough can be used to bake beautifully patterned biscuits. Simon is baking striped biscuits today. Simon rolls out the light and dark dough evenly, about 1 cm thick. Then he cuts a rectangle out of both types of dough, about 40 cm wide and 80 cm long. He places the light-coloured dough rectangle exactly on top of the dark one. Now he cuts it in half lengthwise and places one half on top of the other without turning it over. He repeats the whole process again: he cuts it in half lengthwise and places one half on top of the other without turning it over. Now Simon has an 80 cm long dough strip. He cuts this into slices. Now all that’s left to do is bake them, and the striped biscuits are ready!
What do Simon’s biscuits look like?

18.

Late in the evening, Valentin bakes vanilla crescent cookies. He is about to open the oven to put the first tray in. In the oven door window, he sees the reflection of the digital clock that stands on the opposite side. The reflection of the display looks like this:

One hour and 10 minutes later, he takes the last tray out of the oven.
Once again, he sees the time reflected in the oven door window.
What does Valentin see?

19.

This year, the fairy Felicitas wanted to give the gnomes a basket of her homemade Spitzbuben cookies with apricot jam. The journey was long and led through the fairy tale forest. She put her basket down under an old tree to rest for a while. After a few minutes, her eyes began to close, but suddenly she heard a rustling sound and woke up. Four gnomes quickly hopped out of the basket and had an innocent look on their faces. But they had cookie crumbs in their beards, and Felicitas immediately saw that some of the Spitzbuben cookies were missing from the basket. The gnomes had been snacking. “Come on,” she called, “how many Spitzbuben cookies did the four of you eat in total?”
The gnomes came clean, and this is what they said:
Waldemar grumbled, “More than 3, but less than 7.”
Tarel admitted, “More than 7, but less than 12.”
His brother Nisse said, “More than 11, but less than 16.”
And Funkel said, “More than 14, but less than 18.”
Felicitas knew, that in a group of gnomes, half of them are speaking the truth and half of them are lying. Fortunately, these gnomes weren’t particularly clever, and Felicitas quickly figured it out. How many Spitzbuben cookies were missing?

20.

Aunt Frieda has five star-shaped cookie cutters with 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 points for her hazelnut stars. To decorate them, she piped icing onto the stars in fine lines using a piping bag. For four of the stars, Aunt Frieda started at one tip and decorated the stars with straight lines from tip to tip without stopping even once. For one of the 5-pointed stars, however, she had to put down the piping bag while decorating and start again at another tip. Which one?

21.

Alexandra has bought a baking book with Christmas recipes. There are all kinds of biscuits, spicy speculoos, and stollen. Everything looks delicious. Alexandra wants to bake almond gingerbread first. She is amazed at how many different gingerbread recipes there are. In her book, the section with gingerbread recipes starts on page 27. The last gingerbread recipes are on page 42. There are two recipes per page. How many gingerbread recipes are there in Alexandra’s baking book?

22.

For a winter hike, Kai, Heike, Malte, and Laika took a large bag of Alphabet cookies with them for their break. After they had already nibbled on a few numbers and letters, Kai emptied the bag:

“There are only letters left,” Heike notes. Malte suggests, “Come on, let’s write our names!” Everyone grabs the letters. And it works: the four children can write their names at the same time. In the end, there are a few letters left. “Can we make a word out of these letters?” wonders Laika.
What word can be made out of the remaining letters?

23. Luisa wraps the presents for her family. Everyone gets a few homemade apricot hearts.
Her brother Tobias gets 3 more hearts than her father, and her father gets 2 hearts less than her mother.
Then Luisa’s mother gets

24.

24 Questions - 2025 Math Kangaroo Advent Calendar MAXI