Tick Tock Market: Time, Coins

Quarter to four. Thirty-five cents. Change from a dollar. Every Saturday at a small-town Oregon farmers market, under striped awnings and a brick clock tower, a friendly Douglas squirrel runs a little stall and needs a helper who can read the clock and count the coins. Each Stall your child finishes earns the squirrel new market gear, from an apron to a market cart of its very own.

Tick Tock Market teaches children aged 6 to 8 to tell time and count money. Your child drags the hands of a big clock, reads a clock and picks the digital time, hears a time and finds the clock that shows it, sorts a day into morning and night, learns the penny, nickel, dime and quarter, drags coins onto a mat to make an amount, counts a pile of coins starting with the biggest, pays for an apple, and makes change by counting up from the price. A read-aloud picture book closes every Stall.

HOW SCHOOLS TEACH IT
- Eight Stalls: o'clock; half past; quarter past and quarter to; five minutes at a time; to the minute with a.m. and p.m.; the coins; counting coins to one dollar; dollars and making change
- A real clock: the short hand moves between the numbers just as it does on the wall, so half past three looks like half past three
- Times are heard in clock words ("quarter to four") and read the digital way ("3:45"), and every answer joins the two
- Coins drawn at their true sizes: the dime the smallest, the quarter the biggest, the penny the copper one
- Any correct way of making an amount counts, and then the squirrel shows the way with the fewest coins
- Each new skill is guided first, then built with a little help, then done alone, with a help button always there
- Over 550 clock and money questions and 8 picture books, every one taught before it is asked

NO TIMERS, NO HURRY
- Times and amounts your child is unsure of come back; the strong ones are spaced out
- The Practice button and a daily Market Special build short lessons from just what is needed
- A wrong answer gets help from the squirrel and returns a little later
- Everything a child needs to understand is spoken aloud

THE MARKET WALL
- A wall of clocks and a coin album that turn full color once your child knows them well
- Streaks, stars, stickers, medals, badges and a trophy shelf
- A girl or boy shopkeeper in an apron of your child's favorite color, with a matching narrator voice (the squirrel is Penny with the girl narrator and Nick with the boy narrator), for up to three players

FOR PARENTS
- The money is pretend: nothing can be bought with it, and the game never talks about real shopping, saving or spending
- The parent area (behind a multiplication question) shows each Stall's progress and what to practice next, with sound, music and voice switches and a reset for each player
- No ads, no accounts, no sign-in, no chat, no links and no data collected. Plays offline.

FREE STALL
Stall 1 (the clock and o'clock: 11 stops and the first picture book) is free. One grown-up purchase unlocks Stalls 2 to 8 for good. No subscription.