Find the place of a counter

💡 How it plays and why it helps

Without numbers on it, a strip is a puzzle until you decide where to start. In Find the place of a counter, a Pre-K child sees a row of five, six or seven empty boxes with one counter sitting on it. The instruction is read aloud: count the boxes from the left and choose the place of the counter. Your child taps one of four numbers. A round has five strips, and every answer is checked.

The answer here is a place, not an amount. Starting points matter. The child counts boxes from the left edge and stops where the counter sits, which is the root of ordinal numbers: second, third, fifth. The hint is a body move: put a finger on the first box and walk it box by box up to the counter.

One choice is a trap worth noticing. On a strip of seven boxes, 7 sits among the answers, and a child who counts every box will tap it. Ask, "Where did your finger stop?" Then praise the stopping: "You stopped right on the counter."