The New York Times recently featured Elizabeth Jensen's interview with Nickelodeon's president Cyma Zarghami. She identified the reason the company is going to focus on math: "This opportunity is wide open."

She pointed out that Sesame Street is already emphasizing number use. So StudyBuddy took a look at what's there at both sites, and at the rest of what's out there.

On Nickelodeon we tried three math games for preschoolers: one was a ski board game that prompted quick use of the space bar to jump over obstacles; one was a rainforest adventure using the same option; one was a useful adventure in choosing shapes from pictures that would help us outline a submarine, a helicopter, and a hot air balloon.

At Sesame Street we didn't get very far because of annoying ads and loud sound promotions we found distracting. We were expecting to find something indicating the show's response to President Obama's call, late last year, for increased media attention to math and science. We did find a great series of math programs, the old Square One TV. But it's history.

So we decided to go see what else is out there.

From a site in the United Kingdome called CrickWeb we found excellent kindergarten math links. The really useful thing for parents is that it's easy to find, from a list, the games that do exactly what you want to do with your child. If you want shapes, you choose Shape Sorter. If you want sequencing you try Check Out Cookie – what comes next? Then you try Sequencing – type the missing number.

A site with an even broader range is IXL Math. It begins with counting dots, for the pre-schoolers, and goes on systematically. First grade skills start page help a child count. After the child can count to a hundred, an exercise helps him count by twos, and then by fives. The next step is learning odd and even numbers, and then writing out numbers in words.

A nice little exercise for second graders is called a skip-counting story. It says a lake has two swan and two lakes have four swans. Then it asks how many swans would there be in three lakes, and lists several numbers as options.

Third-grade exercises introduce place-value. This is done with stacks of cubes, 10 in a row. The question is "How many?" and what's shown is a number of stacks and then some single cubes. Then a section called Comparing Numbers teaches addition and subtraction.

Fourth-grade exercises introduce multiplication and word problems.

Fifth-grade exercises go right up through multiplying decimals and finding percentages. Skills like these constitute the basis of all the child's subsequent work (and even managing money in adult life). It's great to have these easy ways to head off the kind of math anxiety that comes up in high school. Take a look and let us know what you think by emailing us at jradcli@mystudybuddy.org.