Which Orchard Toys games are useful for dyscalculia?

Georgina Durrant (qualified teacher and former SENDCO, now SEN tutor and founder of The SEN Resources Blog) recently wrote a post highlighting her recommended resources for parents and teachers supporting children with dyslexia, which you can read here. Due to its popularity, she decided to write a similar blog post but this time focus on numeracy resources that can help children with dyscalculia.

Dyscalculia is a specific difficulty with maths understanding that makes maths sums and problem-solving with numbers much more challenging. Every area of maths can be affected by dyscalculia from telling the time, to doing addition calculations.

Here are some of Georgina’s favourite Orchard Toys games that she recommends to help support numeracy skill development for children with dyscalculia:

Match and Count

Match and Count is ideal for young children with dyscalculia who may find counting really difficult. There’s twenty pairs of puzzle pieces and the children have to count the animals and find the number piece that matches. A lovely, fun way of helping children to practise counting and make links between the written number and the number they have counted.

To purchase Match and Count, click here.

Catch & Count:

Georgina believes that another brilliant game for helping make the association between the written number and the number of objects counted is Catch and Count. Children spin the colourful, ocean-themed spinner and then count the number of bubbles and collect the matching cards on their fish board. She absolutely adores the underwater theme of this game, it’s really fun for kids and makes a lovely family game to play together to help practise numeracy skills (without the kids realising!)

To purchase Catch and Count, click here.

The Game of Ladybirds:

If your focus is on getting to grips with counting, then this is the game you need. It’s perfect for pre-school age and older children who need a bit of extra practice with their counting and it’s great fun too! Players roll the dice, count the number on the dice and try and find a leaf with that number of dots on. They then turn over the leaf to see how many ladybirds are hidden under it! The player with the most ladybirds at the end of the game wins. What’s particularly lovely about this game is the winner is simply just based on luck of how many ladybirds happen to be under each leaf, not who is the best at counting! This helps to build confidence and a love of maths.

To purchase The Game of Ladybirds, click here.

Times Tables Heroes

We sent Georgina our Times Table Heroes game, which she’d actually already heard about through a friend, as it’s a favourite for her family and it’s clear to see why. (I say ‘game’, there’s actually two games in one. You get the brilliant Hero City Board Game and Multiplication Bingo.)

Georgina believes that times tables can be really challenging to memorise for a lot of children and it can lead to children being (understandably) very reluctant to practise them. Therefore, having such exciting games that children want to play and that also helps them learn their times tables is fantastic! She found the illustrations on the box and the game very ‘cool’ and not at all ‘babyish’ which she found helped older children get over the initial reservations of playing a maths game together.

To purchase Times Tables Heroes, click here.

Follow The SEN Resources Blog on Facebook by clicking here, or visit her blog here for further advice 😊