What a five-year-old is working on
Three things, and none of them is arithmetic. The order of the alphabet, so that letters stop being twenty-six unrelated shapes. Counting that stays reliable past ten, which is harder than it sounds because English and Polish both go strange in the teens. And sorting — by colour, by size, by whether a thing is alive — which is the beginning of every kind of reasoning that comes later.
Reading is not assumed
Every game on this page can be played by a child who cannot yet read. The questions are spoken aloud, the answers are pictures or colours, and where a word does appear it is read out. A five-year-old who is stuck should be stuck on the thinking, never on the instructions.
How long a session should be
A round is five to eight questions and takes about two minutes. At this age two or three rounds is a session, and stopping while a child still wants one more is the whole trick. There is no streak to break and nothing is lost by not playing tomorrow.