Garfield’s Mental Math Games is a wonderful tool bi-lingual tool which enables children to develop a visual image of number relationships, at their own pace. It entices young students to think in groups of 5 and 10 and see numbers as one quantity, rather than counting individual beads.
When students “subitize” or see numbers as one quantity rather than individual beads, adding and subtracting is much more efficient than one-by-one counting. The game also teaches the learning of fact families and using various combinations to 5, 10 and 20.
All of the text and audio can be toggled between English and Spanish at anytime by the student. The first 2 parts of the game are based on the rekenrek or arithmetic rack, developed by Adrian Treffers at the Freudenthal Institute in Holland.