games for math

A good friend of mine let me borrow one of her books the other day...

Games for Math

It is such a cool little book! I have acquired quite a collection of math game books but haven't really loved any of them. Then my friend let me borrow this one. First of all, it does not require a collection of fancy materials to make the games work. And for the most part, there is no prep.

I decided to try out our first game yesterday. Clara and I played in the morning and she enjoyed it so much that she wanted to teach Alex how to play that afternoon.


Basically, each child rolled the die twice. On the first roll, they made that many big circles on their card. On their second roll, they made that many items inside each big circle.

Then we wrote out the problem two ways...
First as an addition problem, then as a multiplication problem.

So, in the case of Clara's pink card at the bottom...on her first roll she got a six, so she made six big circles. Her second roll, she got a two, so she made two little circles inside each big circle.

Since we were only concerned about the little circles, her addition equation looked like this:

2+2+2+2+2+2=12

and her multiplication equation looked like this:

2x6=12

She didn't actual "do" the multiplication. We worked more on the concept of how to set up the equation and seeing the relationship between it and the addition equation.

Oh... back to the game... whoever had the highest answer on their card got to keep both cards. In the end, the person with the most cards won. I'm not sure if that was how it was outlined in the book but that's how it ended up at our house. The kids love to play war so they just treated it like a different version of that game.

I can't wait to try more of the games from this book!