In this guest post, Shelly talks about some of her favourite ways to use Ordinal Number printouts available from Activity Village.
Ordinal Number Cards
By Shelly
We have been using some of the Ordinal Number printouts with my youngest so I thought I would share our favourite ones and the ways in which we have used them.
You can find all Activity Village's ordinal number printables here.
Ordinal Number Puzzle
I love this simple puzzle. It is a great first way of introducing which ordinal number words match with which abbreviations. The colour coding is very helpful for first time users. This version covers 1 to 10 and there is another for numbers 11 to 20.
After my youngest had played around with the puzzle we actually pinned it up on a notice board in our house (the colours used in the puzzle has made this one of my favourite ordinal number items to pin up).
Racing Car Ordinal Number 1-10 Cards
These were perfect for my son. We printed ours out on card as I knew they would be used a fair bit. We started with his toy cars having a race and then at the end of the race he would allocate positions using the racing car cards. He loved this idea and ended up having multiple car races just so he could have different winners! If you have hot wheels the kids can also have fun letting the cars race off the track and then allocate the different position cards to the correct cars – although be warned this can get fairly loud – both of my kids were cheering the different cars on!
Allocating ordinal numbers to toy cars
We also used the racing car ordinal number cards on my son's road puzzle. There are so many different toys that could be used with these ordinal number cards. For example, if you have one of those wooden train tracks you could use that, or you could enlist toy people (ask your child to place the lego lady into the 1st car and the playmobile knight into the second etc).
Using our ordinal number racing car cards with existing toys like this farm road puzzle
After he had had some time to play around with the racing car cards and I knew he understood the abbreviations, we brought out some plain ordinal number word cards for him to match. I purposely used these as there was no colour code to help him. He now had to read the words and match them to the correct abbreviations without the extra help. We first started with the numbers in the correct order ...
Matching ordinal number word cards to racing card cards
And then we mixed them up!
Matching the correct ordinal number word card to the racing car cards
We stuck with the numbers 1-10 for some time and made sure he was happy with those before we introduced 11-20.
The Racing Cars were a massive hit with my little guy but you can also find cute owl cards and fish cards for the ordinal numbers.
Fish Cards
We have a large set of fish counters so I could not resist printing out the full set of fish cards (1-20) and we used them in a fun fish game. The kids threw some of the fish counters onto our lounge floor and then walked around with the fish cards and allocated the cards to the different fishes.
Fish ordinal number cards matched to fish counters
I think the different ordinal number cards are perfect for interactive learning. If you print them on card and cut them out the kids can really get involved using them with their toys and the more they physically move the position cards around the more they get the proper understanding of the positions.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
