Our Mental Math Card Game
My kids struggle with mental math. We came up with a fun card game to practice our mental math skills. *Warning - this post might ramble a bit!
Our game is played with two decks of regular playing cards. Each player starts with ten cards. The object of every round is to "go out" like Rummy. Every round is played by creating an equation with the cards in your hand. For example, in round "1" all cards layed down have to equal 1. You can use addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. We don't pay attention to the suits, just use the numbers. 9+2-Queen equals 1. I would lay down my 9,2 and Queen.(Face cards are 10 and Aces are 15.) We start by drawing one card and always discard one card. It really has helped mine with mental math skills. It really starts to get interesting when you get up to the double and triple digit rounds. I'm amazed by some of the equations my kids come up with. It's really neat when they can lay down all of their cards in a single play. I think this works so well for us because my kids are very competitive. They love to play games like Scrabble and a version of Trivial Pursuit we made up.
Just a fun game we use to take a break from "regular math class"
Oh btw, we keep score in our card game also. All the number cards on the table are worth 5 pts, the face cards are worth 10 and aces are 15. If you don't "go out" you have to subtract the cards left in your hand from your score.
2 comments:
Cute. I have a similar game which uses strings of numbers (phone numbers will do). It uses three classes of pieces. A = {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}, B = {=}, C = {(,),+,-,x,/} . Take any string, say 8361741. Place the "=" anywhere between first and last digits, say 836=1741. Use symbole from C to make this true. 8-3+6=1+7+4-1 or 8x36=1+7x41. I believe that all 7-digit strings are solvable. I haven't found a solution for 737375, 737573, or 757373.
Thanks Malcolm, we really have alot of fun with our game. I'll have to try yours out. Maybe we can come up with an answer to the last three strings.
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