The Great Race
Spin, then name the squares you move through. Not "one, two".
For grown-ups
- How long: 5 to 10 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
- The strategy to reinforce: “Count on” — Start from the square you are on, not from one. On 3 and spinning 2? Say “four, five”. If they stall, remind them of this rather than giving the answer.
- When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
- On the timer: it is off unless you turn it on, and it is never needed. Use it only once the skill is comfortable, never to introduce it.
- Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.
What this practises
Moving along a numbered line by counting on from where you are.
A linear number board is the single best-evidenced early-number activity there is: Siegler and Ramani (2009) found large gains in number line estimation from about an hour of play, and the same game on a circular board produced far less — the left-to-right layout is doing the work. The second detail matters as much: the child must name the squares they pass through, counting on from where their token is. Laski and Siegler (2014) found that counting on produced roughly double the gains of counting from one, so tapping "1, 2" is treated as the error it is and corrected.
- The underlying idea
- A linear board maps number onto space, and counting on encodes magnitude rather than moves.
- Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics
- Kindergarten Unit 2: Numbers 1–10 · Kindergarten Unit 6: Numbers 0–20
- Sources
- Siegler et al. (2009) · Siegler et al. (2008) · Laski et al. (2014) · Institute of Education Sciences / What Works Clearinghouse (2021) · Schneider et al. (2018) all references →
Related measured skills: MagPI · Number line estimation, ALPACA · Early number. What this means