CAMathories Ugly Duckling

Fun and interactive animated stories and games designed, written, and reviewed by a team of renowned early childhood education researchers, mathematicians, and scientists from the University of Cambridge to teach young children mathematics! Each CAMathories™ game also contains a series of teaching notes to help parents to teach their children mathematics based on the content of the games as well as real-life situation. CAMathories™ provide a brand new experience of teaching mathematics to young children and make them love learning mathematics. Wish you happy CAMathoring!

CAMathories™ are thoughtfully written, designed and tested by a dedicated team of early childhood education researchers, mathematicians and scientists, please visit www.CAMathories.com to learn more about the team.

Extensive research has shown that young children learn about mathematics best when they solve problems that attract their interest. Using well-loved tales, with familiar characters and settings as a starting point helps to give children confidence and ensures that they feel comfortable as they learn.

When these stories, and the games and puzzles embedded within them, are shared by children and their parents (or other caregivers), they will encourage children to talk about their ideas in mathematics. Such discussions are vitally important in enabling young children to acquire a firm grasp of basic mathematical processes.

Our CAMathories™ are based on these principles, derived from sound research.

This second one of our CAMathories™, designed for 3-5 year old children, tells The Surprising Tale of the Ugly Duckling. Why do all the other animals on the farm laugh at the ugly duckling? How does he discover that he is not a duck at all?

This telling of this well-loved fairy tale involves young children in helping Mother Duck to count her eggs and chicks, Mother Goose to count her goslings and introduce them to Mother Swan, and Mother Swan to count her cygnets.

The maths games and puzzles involved in this little adventure involve the children in:
• counting the numbers of the various baby animals, up to 8
• doing simple subtraction, as Mother Duck’s eggs hatch
• matching each number word to each animal
• learning that each number in counting is one more than the previous number
• learning that when you count anything, the last number tells you how many there are
• learning that you will get the same number of animals, in whichever order you count them

General notes on the CAMathories website provide guidance for how to play the games with your children so that they have fun and learn some valuable maths skills. Each game in the story is also accompanied with the same notes for that game under these 3 headings:

This game helps your child to learn about
(explaining the maths behind the game)

Talk about
(suggesting maths language you can introduce when talking about the game)

More ways to help
(giving examples of playful ways of extending the learning)

The icon of Notes for each game is at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Click on it and the notes will pop up on the screen.