Ten-Frame Fill
A wooden frame already holds a few acorns. Your child chooses how many more fill it to 5 or 10 - counting on and complements in one short round.
The five games
Dot Sense
Dots appear in small groups. Instead of counting one by one, your child names the whole group at a glance, which is the root of estimating and quick addition.
Balance Scale
Both sides of a scale must weigh the same. It turns equality into something physical, so "more", "less", and "the same" stop being abstract words.
Part-Whole Builder
The whole and one part are shown; the missing part has to be found. This is the number-bonds model behind later addition and subtraction.
Bead Bridge
Beads slide across a bridge in groups of 5, 10, and 20, so counting on feels like moving a bead instead of reciting numbers.
Number sense at each age
3-4 years: quantity before counting
Toddlers do not count everything yet. They need to see three apples as three apples. Dot patterns and one-to-one matching in Ten-Frame Fill build that first impression of amount.
4-5 years: counting on and complements
Now the child can count to 10 and starts asking "how many more?". Filling a frame to 5 or 10 is exactly that question, and it is where complements to 10 get memorized without noticing.
5-6 years: parts, wholes, and equality
Numbers start splitting into parts. Part-Whole Builder and Balance Scale train the two ideas that make first-grade arithmetic painless: a whole is made of parts, and different parts can weigh the same.
How to use it at home
Sessions should be short: three to five minutes, once or twice a day, and stop while it still feels like play. On a tablet every game works with taps only - no reading required beyond the numbers. Naming what the child noticed ("you saw five without counting") builds the vocabulary that later makes math explanations possible.