Teaching Ordinal Numbers Using Favorite Toys

A photo of Star Wars characters in a line, waiting to get on a space ship. In front of each figure is a small note card that reads first, second, third, etc.

As you can probably tell from my recent blog posts, I have a student right now who really loves Star Wars. I like to use his interests as a teaching opportunity whenever possible, so we lined up these toy figures and practiced ordinal numbers with them.

I modeled this first by putting the cards in their correct locations, while saying for each one, "The Storm trooper is first...Yoda is second" and so on.

After this, I let the student put the labels on. After the student labeled them correctly, he got to put the toys on the ship and fly it around (which he loves).

The numerals written on the cards are sort of a prompt for the correct order, so eventually, you might want to fade that prompt by cutting off the bottom of the cards and just using the words.

As a couple of notes, before doing this activity, I would make sure that the student is able to read all of those words. I would also practice this activity multiple times over different days, just to make sure that the student remembers the words long-term.