Early Numbers and Counting – Early level Mathematics Activity 

1. Select a background 

• Select the icon at the centre of the top of the page with the blue sky and green grass.
• A menu of backgrounds will appear. Select the background named ‘River’ by double clicking on it.

2. Select characters

• Click on the blue circle with the white plus sign on the left-hand-side of the page and a selection of characters will appear.
• For this activity, scroll through the characters and select five apples, seven peaches, three rowing boats, and ten flowers. To select the characters double click on them. For every new character you make, you must go back and select the blue circle with the white plus sign, repeating the process until you have all of your characters.
• Drag the apples to one tree, the peaches to another, the boats to the river and the flowers to the grass. To make your characters smaller, select them one by one then select the purple icon from the icon bar and drag the ‘SHRINK’ key down to the white space.

3. Command your characters

After a pupil tells the class how many of an item there is, count them as a class. As you count them, the fruit should fall off of the trees, the boats should move down the river and the flowers should jump up.

• To do this, select a character you would like to move and select the blue icon on the icon bar.
• For the fruit, select the arrow pointing down the way, for the boats select the arrow pointing to the right, and for the flowers, select the arrow which appears to be going up and over.
• As you select each character one at a time, you have to drag the arrow down to the white space below the icon bar. Each icon will have a number below it, this tells you how many steps the character is going to take in your chosen direction. You can change this number using the number pad to suit how far you want the characters to move.
• Repeat this with each character.

4.  Count your characters

• When you are all set up and are counting the items with the class, click on each character as you want to move them on the bar at the side and click on the command on the white space to make it move.

Watch this video of the process in action!

Why use this in the classroom?

Firstly, by moving the characters one at a time as the class counts them, it makes sure that they will be focussed on the moving character. It also means that the teacher can control the pace of the counting, reducing the chances of some pupils dominating the counting while others are left behind.

Secondly, young children love anything interactive and this type of lesson is very interactive. It provides possibilities for the teacher to control the characters or for pupils to be rewarded for good behaviour by being allowed to control the characters as the class counts. This makes it a much more memorable experience and will hopefully help the learners to practise counting effectively.

Finally, with you as the creator, the possibilities of uses for this programme are endless! Similar ideas can be adapted to suit topics which the learners in your class will be able to relate to and the complexity of each lesson is completely in your hands.