Miss G loves playing all sorts of card games, so when I came across Make Ten, a simple game that focuses math skills and uses just a generic deck of cards, I knew it would be a total hit.
UPDATE: Since sharing this game and our Make Ten printable play mat, I’ve had countless requests for play mats using larger numbers… Well, I’m so happy to say that I’ve finally gotten around to creating a couple of options and best of all – they’re customizable and can be used with any larger number you choose! Scroll to the very bottom of this post to find them.
Numbers are currently HUGE in our house. Writing numbers, counting, skip counting, subtraction, dividing things into equal groups, addition… You name it, Grae loves it. {And of course I love that she loves it. ☺}
After the success of last week’s play dough subtraction smash, I decided that we’d focus on another playful math activity this week, and since Miss G’s been all about getting going with Valentine’s Day stuff since we took down our Christmas tree, I thought we’d incorporate that too. While hearts were {of course} the first thing that popped into my mind, I wanted to switch things up a little, so an arrow addition matching game it was.
Not going to lie, this week’s preschool book club was a bit of a tough one… Tough because firstly, we couldn’t find the book anywhere. We visited bookshops, we visited grocery stores with book sections, we visited our school’s library, and we asked pretty much all of our friends. No book! Brad eventually scrounged up a digital version for us to see on the iPad, but after a friend suggested it this morning, I’m guessing that one of Kuwait’s many Instagram shops would have had it! I hadn’t thought of that. {Is this an around the world thing, or a Kuwait specific thing? Here you can order almost anything via Instagram and Whatsapp and have the items delivered to your door.} The second thing that made this week’s PBC challenging was that without the book physically in my hands, I had no inspiration. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a fun activity to go with it. It was frustrating. Eventually though, I thought of something {a very simple math game focused on addition and subtraction} and it’s pretty awesome. Not awesome because it was crazy cool or unique, but awesome because Gracen did not want to stop playing. In fact, we played from about 9:00 to 10:45 a.m. yesterday morning. One round after the next – non-stop! I love when something that was initially challenging turns out so well.
Early this morning Miss G asked me if we could play an adding game {the girl loves addition currently}. Not having anything prepared, I quickly scanned the room for something that could be turned into a math game without much fuss. Our ever-growing LEGO collection caught my attention first and I knew it had potential. I grabbed several bricks as well as a couple of just-purchased wooden dice {in coordinating colours, obviously ☺}. I figured we could use the dice to generate our addition questions and the LEGO bricks as counters, then added in the plastic serving tray just to give the game a defined playing area and surface.
Throughout our days together, it’s not unusual for Gracen to come up to me and say something like, ‘Okay, Mama. There are 3 little ducks swimming in the pond at the park. 2 more ducks come to swim. How many ducks are there now?’ The girl comes prepared, too. More times than not, she has a pencil sketch on a huge piece of white paper in her arms to help illustrate the problem. She waits for my response eagerly, then pauses to calculate the total herself once she’s received my answer. I get a peppy ‘Yup! You are right!’ and then it’s my turn to create a story problem for her to solve. This goes on again and again.