Number Word Matching Game

One of the concepts I'm working on with my five-year-old right now is number sense. We are doing a lot with manipulatives, including an abacus, to build an intuitive sense for numbers. Meanwhile, she is also in the beginning stages of reading and finding that number words can be some pretty tricky fellows. (I mean seriously, "two"? "eight"? "one"? Who came up with these spellings??)



So I came up with the following game to help reinforce the association between the actual quantity represented by a numeral, and the appropriate number word.

The game board has dots representing the quantities one through ten, in order across the board. Then I gave her a set of cards, mixed up, that each had a number word printed on it. She just had to put the word cards on top of the corresponding quantity. And that's it!



Okay, might seem boring, but she got a real kick out of it, and it's a quick little exercise to keep building her familiarity with number words. And a little more engaging than flash cards. I think if we play this little game every day for a week or two, she'll have those number words down cold.

Of course the first thing she did was to annotate the game board with the appropriate numerals. (Backwards.) Hey, it's all learnin'...



The game board and cards are available as PDF's for your downloading pleasure. I recommend printing them on card stock. Just cut out the cards, and voilà! You can match up your numbers and words with the best of 'em.