About Us

I’m Pete and I’m a dad of five-year-old twins. As a developer by trade, I built these games because I wanted a fun way to support what my two were learning at school, so we could practise together at home. I noticed that my girls were always curious about the games I’d play on my phone like Squaredle and Wordle and realised that they wanted versions of their own.

I started with Fredle, which follows the phonics framework from their school to help them find words and sounds that they are learning. My girls soon wanted more, so we now have games for maths, languages, geography and more. With a range of games on different topics, you may also find yourself wanting to play them alongside your little ones (we do!).

About Number Words

Number Words is a gentle, no-ads spelling game for children aged 4 to 8. A number is shown — say 17 — and the letters below spell it out, but they’re broken in some way. Your child works out the spelling and fixes the letters to earn a star. Number words are some of the trickiest spellings in English: forty (not “fourty”), ninety (not “ninty”), twelve, eighteen. They’re mostly irregular — you can’t sound them out, you just have to know them — which is exactly why they’re worth practising.

It grows with them. It starts with the small numbers under ten and, as your child gets the hang of it, climbs through the teens, the tens (twenty, thirty, forty…) and on to the bigger numbers like twenty-one. Early on they just add the one missing letter or take away a letter that doesn’t belong — a simple tap, or a drag if they prefer. Later the game steps up to swapping a wrong letter for the right one and sliding a stray letter back into place.

How to play

• Look at the number and work out how to spell it.
• Add: tap the missing letter, or drag it into the empty box.
• Take away: tap the letter that doesn’t belong, or drag it out of the word.
• Swap: drag the right letter on top of the wrong one.
• Reorder: one letter is out of place — drag it back where it belongs.
• Get it right and the letters turn green — you win a star, and the game nudges a little harder. Find it tricky and it eases back. The number is always there, so there’s always a way in.

The difficulty is automatic — it grows with your child, starting under ten and scaling up — and there’s a Start again from the beginning button in settings to reset it all to easy whenever you need to.

Why spelling numbers matters

Writing numbers as words is a real school skill — number words sit on the statutory common-exception (“tricky”) word lists precisely because they break the usual spelling rules. Fixing a broken spelling makes a child look hard at each letter: the silent gh in eight, the missing e in ninety, the stray u some children add to forty. There are no timers, no streaks and no flashing rewards: just a number, some letters and a little star when it clicks.

More from Tadpole Games

Number Words is one of a small family of gentle, no-ads, no-login puzzles for curious little minds. Every game shares the same calm, star-not-streak approach:

• Tick or Fix — the phonics version of this game: a picture shows the word, and your child fixes the letters.
• Sumdle — a daily maths puzzle: drag two digits and an operator to make the target number.
• Fredle — a daily phonics word puzzle — trace the grid to find Speed Sounds words.
• ABC Gap — spot and fill the missing letter to complete the word.
• Fred Sort — put the pictures in the right order, from getting dressed to making toast.
• Flagle — the picture-led country-flag game in the same gentle progression style.
• Flower Match — drag each flower across to its leaf and learn common UK plants by sight.
• Spanish Words — tap the flag to hear a Spanish word, then tap the matching picture.