Math Game Mania!

This week, we've been reviewing and learning all sorts of math games to help us build up our math fact fluency and number sense! Here are the rules to a few o the games we have played in class so you can play at home--you can make your own number card deck with a deck of cards by removing the jacks, kings, and queens!

Fishing for Ten

Number of players: 2-5

Directions: shuffle number cards and deal out 5 cards to each player, putting the rest of the cards in a "draw" pile. Make "matches" with your cards by finding two cards that make 10 (for example, 7 and 3, 4 and 6, and 9 and 1 would all be matches). Once players find the matches in their first hand, they can begin asking the other players if they have certain cards in order to match the rest of their cards. If that player has the card you are looking for, they give it to you and you get to ask again. If not, they will tell you to "go fish" and you take 1 card from the draw pile and wait for your next turn. The first player to get rid of all of their cards wins, as does the player with the most matches!

Salute!

Number of players: 3-4

Directions: Two players sit facing one another, with the deck of cards between them. Player #3 (and possibly #4) sits off to the side so that they can see both players’ faces. Player #1 and #2 each pick up a card, and without looking at it, place it on their foreheads. They can see what each other has, but they do not know which card they are holding. Player #3 (who can see both cards) mentally adds the cards together and says the sum out loud. Once Player #3 has said the sum out loud, Players #1 and #2 each try to figure out what card he is holding. So if the sum is 16, and Player #1 can see that Player #2 is holding a 10, he can perform a mental subtraction equation to figure out what he has (16-10=6). The first player to correctly state which card they are holding keeps both cards. The player with the most cards at the end of the game wins.

Here are a few other games we've played in class that you could play at home: 

Addition Top-It

2-3 players

Directions: each player is dealt the same amount of cards, facing down. Once cards are dealt, each player takes two cards and puts them in the middle of the circle, facing up. The player whose cards have the highest sum gets to keep all of the cards and they start a new pile. Once they go through their first card pile, they move onto the new pile. The player with all of the cards or the most cards wins!

Trash

2 players 

Directions: each player makes two rows of 5 cards, facing down, and they put the remaining cards in the middle. Each player takes turns taking a card from the middle pile, and placing that card in numerical order (so, if the card drawn was a 4, it would go in place of the 4th card in the top row, facing up) The player then looks at the card that was previously holding that spot, and they continue to play the cards until they are no longer able to make another move. If they pick up a card and they already have that number card, it goes int the discard pile. The goal of the game is to get all numbers 1-10 in numerical order as shown:

1   2   3   4   5 

6   7   8   9  10

The first player to get all 10 cards in order facing up wins!

We hope you will try out some of these games at home, they are lots of fun for the whole family!