Bundle Bakery

About Bundle Bakery

In Bundle Bakery ten loose cookies pack into a box and ten boxes pack into a crate. Orders come in, "243 cookies, please", and your child loads Pibbit's delivery van with crates, boxes and loose cookies. Each part of the van has its own counter, so a correctly packed van reads 2, 4, 3, the same digits as the order. When the shelf runs out of boxes, they pack their own from ten cookies. Later a customer comes to the window and wants seven cookies when only two are loose, so they tap a box, it pops open into ten, and borrowing in subtraction suddenly makes sense. If the van is wrong, Pibbit checks it place by place and points at the part that needs more or fewer.

Bundle Bakery is one of our numbers & maths games for kids. This one plays in the iPhone and iPad app rather than in the browser, but 33 of our games are free to play right here — browse the full library to find them.

How to Play

• Read the order on the ticket, or tap it to hear it again.
• Tap or drag crates, boxes and cookies into the van. Tap one in the van to put it back.
• When a part of the van has ten, tap Pack 10 to bundle them into a box or a crate, then press Send.
• When a customer asks for cookies, tap loose cookies to hand them over. Not enough loose ones? Tap a box to open it.

Tips & Tricks

• Say the order in parts before packing: "two hundreds, four tens, three ones". The van has a space for each one.
• On the zero levels, point at the empty part of the van and ask why it is empty. A zero means none of those.
• In the customer levels, ask your child to guess how many cookies will be left before they open the box.

What Kids Learn

Bundle Bakery teaches place value the way classrooms do with base-ten blocks, only the blocks are cookies. A loose cookie is a one, a box of ten is a ten and a crate of ten boxes is a hundred. The van has a space for each, and the number under each space is how many are in it, so the packed van and the written number line up digit by digit. That link between a pile of things and the digits in a number is what first and second graders need before written methods make sense.

The later levels cover the two ideas that most often trip children up. Zero levels (305, 640) show that a zero means an empty place, not nothing at all. Customer levels make regrouping physical: when someone wants seven cookies and only two are loose, the child opens a box into ten loose cookies. Then they answer how many are left, and the wrong choices are the classic mistakes, such as 55 for 52 take away 7.

• Place value with hundreds, tens and ones up to 999
• Bundling ten ones into a ten and ten tens into a hundred
• Zero as a placeholder
• Regrouping for subtraction: opening a ten or a hundred

Curriculum links

For teachers and homeschooling parents, here is where Bundle Bakery lines up with what children are taught at school:

• Common Core 1.NBT.B.2: Understand the two digits of a two-digit number as tens and ones
• Common Core 2.NBT.A.1: Understand the three digits of a three-digit number as hundreds, tens and ones
• Common Core 2.NBT.B.7: Add and subtract within 1000, composing and decomposing tens and hundreds

What Age Is Bundle Bakery For?

Made for ages 6 to 8, roughly first to third grade. Levels 1 and 2 (teen numbers, then numbers to 99) suit first graders. Crates, zeros and opening boxes for subtraction line up with second grade, and the last level, three-digit subtraction that needs both a crate and a box opened, stretches into third grade. A grown-up can start any level from the opening screen.

Tips for Parents

Use real things alongside it: bundle drinking straws or lolly sticks in tens with an elastic band.

When your child opens a box, ask what happened to the number. Nothing did: 52 is still 52, just packed differently. That is the key idea behind borrowing.

If an order goes wrong, let Pibbit point at the place first before you help.

Try It Without a Screen

• Count a jar of pasta pieces by bagging them in tens, then grouping ten bags. How many hundreds, tens and ones?
• Play shop with coins: pennies, dimes and a dollar make the same ones, tens and hundreds.
• Write a three-digit number and build it with Lego: single studs, sticks of ten and plates of a hundred.

Bundle Bakery — Frequently Asked Questions