Teach Your Monster Number Skills is a game designed to help children develop their number sense. Designed with experts in early years maths to align with the Reception/Pre-K curriculum, the game is appropriate for children from 3 to 6+ who will all find value in using the game to practice and reinforce key number skills.
What is number sense?
Number sense is the ability to use lots of different skills that we don’t always realise are important — such as breaking numbers apart and putting them together or putting numbers in the right order — to judge how many things there are of something. It’s the difference between children when they’re older being able to add up large numbers in their head instead of still struggling to add them up on their fingers.
Is this game right for my child?
Although the game specifically aligns with the Reception/Pre-K, children up to 6 and beyond will find the game offers valuable practice. Even those who may seem confident with their numbers are often stronger in some of the core concepts than others — it's often the case that children start to struggle with mathematics when they get older, as they've missed the opportunity to practice and understand all of these key concepts. This game will find any gaps they may have, and give them ample opportunity to practice and fill these gaps.
In addition, the game will automatically move them on to more challenging levels — there are over 40 in the game — once they have shown they have mastered each skill.
What's in the game?
The game covers a wide variety of different aspects of early number which align with the new Early Years Learning Goals in the UK, and with other early year mathematics curriculums in the USA and beyond. Topics include:
Counting — including the surprisingly complex array of concepts which feed into this, such as stable order, 1-2-1 correspondence, cardinality and so on
Subitising — also known as the ability to recognize numbers of things without counting
Number bonds — including the composition of each number up to 5 (number bonds up to 10 coming very soon), and how to use them to split up and recombine numbers in useful ways.
Addition and subtraction — building on their work with number bonds children develop fluency with the fundamentals of addition and subtraction
Ordinality and magnitude — including knowing numbers in the right order; knowing where they are in relation to key points such as 0, 5, and 10; and knowing that as you move up each number is one more and move one down it’s one less
Manipulatives — the game uses teaching objects known as manipulatives to represent number problems in lots of different ways including fingers, five frames, ten frames, and dice patterns.
You can read a more detailed explanation of the educational concepts covered in each mini game here.