Number Trains

Communication and Comprehension

The resource provides a set of instructions in the beginning outlining how to play the game. Even though it uses simple words, like “carriages”, “order”, “forwards”, “backwards”, “smaller”, “bigger”, it is still going to help expand students’ vocabulary, especially children for whom English is not their first language. It is also important to note that simple syntax followed in instructions will help learners to not only understand how language works, but also build good communication and comprehension skills.

It would be beneficial to initiate a conversation and encourage students to share their thoughts when playing the game, and prompt questions such as, what mathematical strategies and reasoning they have used to connect the carriages.

Collaboration and Inclusion

It can be played into groups of 3 and 4 students, where every child can take a turn to put the carriage in its right order. Collaboration will ensure to provide equitable learning opportunities, thus also promoting inclusion and student centered learning. Additionally, learning activities done in groups help students to reason and explore their understanding of a concept which assists in improving and reorganizing their knowledge (Van Boxtel, Van der Linden, and Kanselaar, 2000).

Creativity and Curiosity

This activity also motivates students’ to extend their counting involving addition (partitioning) subtizing and subtraction, as they will be consolidating numbers when connecting their train carriages.

Essentially, assembling carriages projects relationships between objects having similar pattern and shape, it can spark their curiosity to look for other objects with similarities in their own surroundings and how they display a sequential pattern to function.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

This interactive game has a feature of correcting students when a carriage is being misplaced. This feature of trial-and-error assists in promoting problem solving skills. Errors are thought to facilitate memory by being able to generate retrieval cues (Anderson & Cyr, 2012).

There are certain levels in games where students’ understanding of numbers is developed using a variety of representation such as, numerals, symbols, number frames, ten-frame/dot pattern or dice dots. This representation will not only improve their knowledge of numbers, but it will also develop their critical thinking skills for solution strategies.