Ordinal Numbers: Find the Place

Three strips run down this Kindergarten ordinal numbers page, and each starts with a small orange flag at the left end of an arrow that runs above a line of seven animals — a raccoon, a gazelle, a camel, a hippo, a cat, a sheep and a tiger in the first line on the sheet shown. Under every animal is a grey dot. Below each line sit two chips: an ordinal number and a mark — 5th with a circle, 6th with a cross. The child starts at the flag, counts along to the place on the chip, and makes that mark on the animal standing there. Six marks finish the page.

The flag is the whole idea. An ordinal only means something once you know where counting starts, and the flag fixes it at the left every time on this page, so the child's job is to count 1st, 2nd, 3rd along the row and stop at the right one. Two chips per line, each with its own mark, keep the child from guessing — a circle on the fifth animal and a cross on the sixth are two separate counts, and the chips reach 6th and 7th as well as 1st. The animals are all different, so the marked one can be named aloud afterwards: the cat is 5th.

It prints on one sheet and needs only a pencil. This is the base page of the ordinal-numbers family and the Kindergarten page with the flag always on the left; the from-either-end page moves the flag to the right on some lines, and the three 1st grade pages ask the child to write the ordinal, read it as a word, or work it out from a picture. Say the ordinal aloud with the child on the first strip.