More Math Games

The past few weeks Sparkle and I have been playing math card games during Glitter's dance class. Another girl, who also has a sister in the same dance class, has been watching us and often joins in. It's fun playing these card games with three people, and Sparkle tends to be less competitive when there's another kid involved. This last week, the other girl's mother asked me about the card games because apparently the girl has really enjoyed them and has been talking about them at home.

The other day we were playing addition war. Each person draws two cards and adds them together. Whoever has the highest number wins all the cards. Repeat. We usually play until we run out of time or we go through the entire deck. It usually takes us a while to add up our numbers. I'm a usually a little faster than Sparkle, but I often get distracted because I'm trying to add her numbers, as well as mine, to make sure she does her sum correctly. Early in the game we thought that we all had the same number, but it turned out that one of us had added incorrectly. Then later in the game all three of us really did have the same sum. I had to take a picture.



The strange thing is the cards are really plain and the games are nothing fancy. The cards are a single solid color with a number printed in the corner. No pictures. No dots. The games merely involve adding or subtracting numbers. There are no pretty pictures. There are no cute characters. There is no plot or storyline. Often we don't even bother to keep score or see who won. Yet the kids enjoy playing. So I'm rethinking my idea of using worksheets to practice math facts and enjoying the games instead. (I still think some written practice is important though, especially for numbers in the teens and multi-digit numbers with zeros.)