Skip Count Stepping Stones

About Skip Count Stepping Stones

Skip Count Stepping Stones shows part of a count and asks for the stone that comes next. It earns its own game because skip counting is the spoken form of a times table: a child who can count fluently in fives already has most of the five times table available to them, and turning one into the other is a far shorter journey than learning the table cold from flashcards. Counting in twos, fives and tens comes first, because those three patterns are audible — the ending digits repeat, and children hear the rhythm before they can explain it. Threes and fours arrive at the top levels, where the pattern is no longer obvious enough to chant and the child has to actually add the step each time, which is where skip counting stops being a song and starts being arithmetic. The distractors are the three errors that genuinely happen: jumping two steps instead of one, landing one either side of the right number, and simply repeating the last stone seen. The run of visible stones grows with the level, so an early child sees more of the pattern before predicting and a later one sees less. Stones drift slowly and stop for anyone with reduced motion enabled, every stone is reachable by tap or keyboard, and each is announced to screen readers. The game is free, needs no sign-up, shows no advertising to children, and keeps all progress on the device.