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Birthday Café

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A screenshot from the Early Math with Gracie & Friends Birthday Cafe app shows cartoon children sitting at tables with food. The numeral 4 is on one table signifying that a tray with four food items should be placed there. Early Math cloud image

In Birthday Café, children serve up birthday treats to a hungry party! Children seat groups of friends at tables and then distribute trays that have the same number of food items. Birthday Café helps children develop number sense and prepares them for mental math by focusing on subtizing, a critical and often ignored early math concept. It’s knowing "how many" without having to count.

A preschool boy in a blue striped shirt plays the Early Math with Gracie & Friends Birthday Cafe app and drags cartoon children to a table while a teacher in a black sweater sits beside him watching.

Birthday Café is part of the four-game subitizing suite from Early Math with Gracie & Friends, a first-of-its-kind mobile app brand based in early learning sciences, rigorously researched and developed specifically for preschool classroom use. A randomized control trial demonstrated significant learning gains in children who used the Early Math with Gracie & Friends apps.

Early Math with Gracie & Friends is not just apps! Our research shows the importance of engaging learners in hands-on, non-digital play in the classroom and at home. In fact, for every Gracie & Friends app, we have created and researched around five hands-on activities! Find the entire curriculum in the digital Teacher’s Guide and explore activities for home in the Family Fun guide.

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Early Math with Gracie & Friends® and Early Science with Nico & Nor® and the characters and related indicia are trademarks and copyrights of WGBH Educational Foundation. ®/© 2014-2024 WGBH Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.