How to help young children learn math – Adding Finger Game

I am working on an adding game for very young kids (2 to 4 year olds). It is based on counting on fingers. Children learn how to add quickly if they start to recognize their hand and finger positions. For instance, children that are good at adding don’t need to count if they see three fingers on one hand, they just know it’s three. Similarly, it is beneficial for a budding child’s faster math skills, for him or her to knows that a full hand of five fingers and the other hand with three is eight, without counting. This game is designed such that the child gets a lot of practice with associating finger positions with the appropriate numbers.

The game progressively gets harder: from basic up to five fingers recognition, then up to ten finger recognition with two hands, and then finally atypical finger positions on two hands (like two fingers on one hand and three fingers on the other hand makes 5). These last two levels are basically addition up to 10. I am planning to add more levels with the proper arithmetic symbol of “+”, and more levels with adding up to 20. but I wanted this out there for your testing and comments first.

When you let your child play this game, please don’t let him / her go to the next level before he is a master at the current level. And get him / her to try not to count, but rather recognize the finger positions. Once they are experts at recognizing the finger positions, they can move onto the next level.

Enjoy, and please let me know how your child’s experience has been with the game by leaving me a small note by using the contact page.

Download the free game by clicking here.