Kindergarten place value now focuses on the ten-frame, with three new games
Kindergarten place value has been tidied up to do one thing well: helping children see the numbers up to 10 on a ten-frame, the little grid of two rows of five boxes. Three games now practise it, and the skills that did not really belong in kindergarten have moved to Grade 1, where they fit better.
A shorter, clearer path. Kindergarten place value used to have three skills. Two of them were really Grade 1 ideas: building teen numbers as a ten and some ones, and bundling ten ones into one ten. Building a teen number is the same idea as building any two-digit number from tens and ones, so it now lives there, with the towers activity that shows it. Bundling is covered by the first Grade 1 place-value skill, which now takes over as the starting point. What stays in kindergarten is one skill, titled "Show numbers to 10 on a ten-frame" (in French, "Montrer les nombres jusqu'à 10 sur un cadre à dix cases").
Three games on the ten-frame.
| Game | What the child does |
|---|---|
| Fill the frame | Adds counters until the frame matches the number shown, then says how many spaces are left. |
| Flash and tell | Sees a frame with some counters for a moment, then picks the number. This game was reworked. |
| Make ten friends | Pairs two frames so that together they fill all ten spaces. |
Each game starts small, with 1 to 5 counters filling the top row, and grows towards 10 and to less usual arrangements. They come in English and French together.
Clearer text for parents. The explanatory text under the place-value pages is now written specifically for this topic instead of being a general paragraph, so it says what children are learning and how to help at home.
What is still to come. For now these games are text-based and keep things simple. Extras such as animated counters, hearing the count read aloud and a "show again" button are planned for a later update.
Grade 1 place value gets ten new games. Right after kindergarten's ten-frame, Grade 1 children now have a full path through tens and ones, five skills with two games each, all in English and French together.
| Skill | Games |
|---|---|
| Ten ones make one ten | Bundle the sticks (group loose sticks into tens); Ten-frame trade-up (fill a frame, swap it for a ten-rod) |
| Whole tens, 10 to 90 | Tens on the hundred-square (hop by tens); Ten-rod shop (buy rods, count the cubes) |
| Build a 2-digit number | Build it with blocks (make the called number); Teen towers (a ten-rod plus loose cubes makes 11 to 19) |
| Name a number from its blocks | Read the blocks; Place-value mat flip (flip the tens and ones cards) |
| The value of each digit | Digit value detective (is the puppet right about what a digit is worth?); Swap the digits (which number is bigger now?) |
Each game follows the usual rhythm: a child moves on after getting 8 of 10 right, with at most two hints, and the questions are generated the same way every time so a session can be repeated. One older, overlapping Grade 1 activity was replaced by the new bundling and hundred-square games, and a child's earlier progress on it carries over.