With Over the Galaxy, your kindergarteners and first graders can blast off to a new planet to work on their counting skills, as well as improve their emotional intelligence!

Developing strong arithmetic skills from an early age provides children with a foundation upon which to later build more advanced math skills. Over the Galaxy is a counting game designed for young children that practices subitizing and speed counting. Subitizing, or the ability to recognize quantities immediately without having to count them, is a skill that requires practice and may take children with learning difficulties longer to master.

In this game the student himself appears on screen to play. On this far away planet, the student’s mission is to collect the spaceships carrying a specific number of objects. The teacher chooses the number, from one to ten, as well as the speed at which the spaceships appear on screen. For kindergarteners who are learning to count, the teacher can select a low number of objects at a slow speed. As students progress, the teacher can adjust to a higher number of objects, as well as an increased speed. Children advance from counting by ones, to skip counting, or counting by multiples of a given number. With practice, the student’s brain is trained to recognize quantities without having to count each individual object, thus acquiring the skill of subitizing.

Over the Galaxy is further customizable as it allows teachers to choose the pattern in which objects are presented, either in ten frame, circle, or dice format. Thus, students learn to recognize that while the objects can appear in different arrangements, the quantity has not changed.

In addition to counting practice, Over the Galaxy also has an “emotions” mode. In this version of the game, students aren’t collecting objects, but, rather, specific alien faces. For example, the student is asked to collect only the happy alien faces amongst the various emotions displayed on screen. The teacher chooses which emotion the student is to collect, as well as what other emotions appear as distractors on screen. By practicing this skill, children develop their emotional intelligence, and the game provides teachers with an opportunity to stimulate classroom discussion about recognizing and expressing feelings.

As with all Kinems games, the built-in progress monitoring system allows teachers to assess which numbers or emotions are challenging their students, and which ones they have mastered. Learn more about Over the Galaxy and check out a demo of the game at https://academy.kinems.com/games/over-the-galaxy.