Who Wins the Race? Write the Place

Six lanes stack down this 1st grade page, each a long card with a dashed track running from the left, a chequered finish line at the right, and an empty box beyond it. One animal racer sits in each lane, and every racer is a different distance from the finish — on the sheet shown a camel is almost touching the line, a horse and a tiger are behind it, a fish is near the middle, and a rabbit and a hippo have barely left the start. The child looks at how far each racer has to go, decides who is nearest, and writes 1st in that box, then 2nd, 3rd and on to 6th.

No two racers are level, so there is exactly one order, but it has to be read off distance rather than counted along a line, which is what makes this page different from every other ordinal page in the family. There is no flag: the finish line is the reference and nearest means first. Children who read the lanes top to bottom and write 1st at the top have answered a question the page did not ask; the racer in the fourth lane down is the winner here. The six animals come from the wave's animals theme.

One sheet, six boxes. This is the race face of the ordinal-numbers family, the page where the ordinals come from a comparison instead of a count from a flag, and the only one with a finish line. It works well read aloud as a commentary — the camel is in first place, the horse is second. The write-the-missing-ordinal-numbers page is the notation practice to pair with it.