Ordinal Words: Draw a Line to the Picture

Two long strips fill this 1st grade page. In each, eight farm animals stand in a line behind a flag and an arrow — an ox, a rooster, a turkey, a foal, a goat, a cow and others on the sheet shown — and under the line, after a tall gap, sit five word chips in a shuffled row: second, third, seventh, fifth, eighth on the first strip; fifth, third, second, seventh, sixth on the second. The child reads each ordinal word, counts from the flag to that place, and draws a line up from the chip to the animal standing there. Five lines per strip, ten in all, and nothing to write.

The ordinal stands alone as a word here — no numeral, no sentence around it — so the child has to read seventh and know it means the seventh place, which is the reading half of ordinal numbers. The chips are shuffled and the gap between them and the animals is deliberately tall: the lines have to cross, and a child who draws them in order finds the page tidier than one who does not. Only five of the eight places are asked for on each strip, so three animals get no line and the child cannot finish by elimination.

It prints on one sheet; a ruler keeps the ten lines legible. This is the word-reading face of the ordinal-numbers family — the write-the-missing page produces the numerals, this page reads the words. The farm theme is the wave's; the base find-the-place page uses animals at large and a numeral on the chip instead of a word.