Hungry Chicks! Preschool Number Recognition and Simple Calculation Game for ages 3-5

Help Chicken feed his hungry chicks! A great game for helping young children to gain confidence with number work and develop their early calculating skills.

Hungry Chicks supports the Early Years Foundation Stage with levels suitable for preschoolers aged 3 – 5. 

In the first of our blog series giving you a glimpse into the wonderful world of Busy Things – here’s everything you need to know about our great preschool number recognition and simple calculation game Hungry Chicks…

Aim of the game – encouraging preschool number recognition and developing calculating skills:

Hungry Chicks is a fun way to reinforce number recognition and develop mental addition.

As the name implies, our chicks are hungry!

You must help Chicken to feed the hungry chicks by collecting up some tasty worms.

Our demanding chicks are very specific about the number of worms needed to satisfy their hunger! Hop up the clouds to reach the nest and fill them up with the correct amount.

Collect the worms from the holes in the ground. Children can take the worms up one at a time, but soon realize that if they calculate the total required before setting off they can feed all the chicks in one go!

As the levels progress, you must also avoid the bird and green monster when flying through the clouds or they’ll knock you off the cloud or gobble you up!

Play instructions:

Hungry Chicks is very simple to play and intuitive for a child to pick up.

Choose the age set-up relevant to your child (you can customise this in the game if you feel the level is too simple or too hard – click the icon in the top right-hand corner of the game).

Simply click a worm to pick it up. Click a cloud to fly to it.

The arrow keys will also move the chicken and pressing the space bar will pick up a nearby worm.

Who should play Hungry Chicks & how to get the most out of it:

Hungry Chicks is a great game to encourage very young children who are reluctant to work with numbers to make simple mental calculations. They will soon be adding small numbers without even realising they are doing it.

Suitable for ages 3 through to 5.

There are fourteen levels of hungry chicks. Starting with simple counting and number recognition, ending at adding up to three numbers to make a total of 9 with progressive levels in between.

The level is automatically chosen depending on which age set-up you start with but this can be changed in the game to suit your child’s ability – making the questions easier or harder as needed. To make the game progress through all fourteen levels, select the Teacher/Parent button in the top right hand corner of the game screen, click on the Spanner icon and select All levels.

Hungry chicks links to the EYFS curriculum – see below for details of the specific areas of learning and development.

The games also helps with concentration, develops mouse-skills and builds confidence.

How to find Hungry Chicks in Busy Things:

Hungry Chicks activity resources:

A counting worms worksheet PDF is also available to download where children can match the worms to the correct number.

Curriculum Links relating to preschool number recognition and calculating:

Hungry Chicks links to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). Specific areas of learning and development are as follows:

Age: 30-50 months

• Sometimes matches numeral and quantity correctly.
• Shows an interest in number problems

Age: 40-60+ months

• Recognises numerals 1 to 5.
• Counts up to three or four objects by saying one number name for each item.
• Finds the total number of items in two groups by counting all of them.

Play Hungry Chicks!

You can play Hungry Chicks and all of our activities by taking out a FREE TRIAL! There are many other preschool number recognition and early calculating games available.

Simply click here to visit our website and start your free trial now.

We’d love to hear what you think of hungry chicks – please let us know in the comments below.