Which Place? Write the Ordinal Number

Three lines of eight pets stand behind flags on this 1st grade page — a frog, a canary, a hamster, a tortoise, a puppy, a gecko, a chinchilla and a lizard in the first line on the sheet shown. Under each line sit two queries: a small copy of one of the pets, an arrow, and an empty dashed box. The child finds that pet in the line above, counts from the flag to it, and writes its place in the box as an ordinal number — the canary is 2nd, the puppy 5th. Six boxes across the page, each one counted from its own flag.

This is the ordinal in the other direction. The base page gives the number and asks for the picture; the write-the-missing page gives the line with gaps; here the picture is given and the number has to be produced from scratch, so nothing on the page shows the child what to write. Each line holds eight distinct pets so the small picture matches exactly one, and the two queries per line are always different animals in different places. A child who writes 5 instead of 5th has counted correctly and missed the ending, which is what the box is there to catch.

One sheet, six short answers. This is the most demanding of the three 1st grade faces in the ordinal-numbers family, because nothing is printed to copy; use it after the write-the-missing page, where four ordinals are given as models. The pets are the wave's theme; the family's base and either-end pages sit at Kindergarten with a mark instead of a written answer.