As our 7-year-old played Garfield Monopoly with his daddy, it occurred to me that they were completing an entire lesson of math review. In fact, my math-teacher brain started kicking into gear as I overheard them discussing rules and strategy. Wow! Exactly how many math concepts were they reviewing?
Well, there’s:
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Number sense
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Consumer math/budgeting/money
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Probability
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Addition
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Subtraction
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Multiplication
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Division
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Percents
We always joke around about Gary being my substitute every now and then, but this was just fantastic! Not only were they spending time together and having fun, but they were also practicing math skills and making math relevant to this little boy’s life in the here and now!
It started me thinking about board games and how almost all of them tie into math in some way or another. (After all, you have to keep score, don’t you?) And so, here is a list of plain old board games (and card games) that we’ve played and how they tie into math:
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Scrabble – Addition (and you can even use this to practice math vocabulary!)
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Battleship – Coordinate system/graphing/spatial reasoning
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Sorry – Addition/Subtraction
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Puzzles -Spatial reasoning
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Deck of cards (War, Go-Fish, and a multitude of other games we’ll talk about in future posts) – addition, subtraction and number sense
Especially for pre-schoolers & primary grades:
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The Ladybug Game – Counting, addition, subtraction
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The Very Hungry Caterpillar Game – Counting
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Uno – Counting
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My First Skipbo – Counting
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Chutes & Ladders – Counting, number sense (less than/more than)
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Hi Ho CherryO!
Every week visit Math Links for other great ideas for teaching math:
Isn’t it great to know that you can teach math with games? It’s a wonderful way to spend time together, make math meaningful, and just plain “live” math out in your lives. So, what about your family? What are your favorite games? What math concepts do you use when playing?