As a mom with degrees in engineering and mathematics, I’ve been just as invested in developing my children’s love of math as I have been their love of reading. Ultimately, I’ve found that the most effective way to foster this passion and deepen their mathematical minds throughout the school year, and especially during the summer, is by making math fun and accessible through play.
Parents can play a vital role in preparing their children to learn math before they start school and in keeping them engaged and deepening their mathematical understanding throughout their school years, especially during the summer. Worksheets and flashcards aren’t the only way to keep math fresh for the fall semester. Games are a great way to keep children engaged with numbers, shapes, and patterns all year round.
Interior with Children Playing Cards by Hugo Salmson (1894)
Making Math Fun: Playful Learning for All Ages
Many board games – not just ones sold as “educational” – offer opportunities to deliberately practice math skills. Practice counting in a meaningful way with very young students by playing games that use dice with dots to move around a board. When my son was a preschooler, he began by counting the dots on one face, moving his pawn the same number of spaces, then counting the dots on the second face, moving his pawn the same number of spaces. Eventually, he didn’t need to count the dots – he recognized the groups of dots without counting. We used the opportunity to stretch his understanding and to model the concept of addition when we moved our pawns, saying out loud “a three and a five are eight”, then counting our pawns from one to eight on the board.
Connecting Numbers and Symbols
Games that use numbered dice (dice with the symbols “1, 2, 3, …” instead of dots) or a spinner with number symbols give young children a chance to practice recognizing and associating a number set with its corresponding symbol. This is very similar to the gentle way parents model early reading skills when they teach a child to recognize the first letter of his name and the sound it makes (“Look! There is an R for Robert! RrrrrrRobert!”) It’s so much fun to play these simple games with your young children when you notice them learning along the way!
Everyday Math for Older Kids
Older children have the opportunity during the summer months to exercise their math minds, too! I love engaging children in activities that build spatial reasoning or that require recall of math skills like multiplication or using fractions. Building LEGO models, cooking from recipes, and helping around the house can all be good math exercises. Consider asking your child to help make pancake batter, but ask him to measure the ingredients with just the ½ and ⅓ cup scoops. Take the opportunity to clean the canned goods out of the pantry – ask your child to sort cans by size or category and fit them back on the shelves.
Our Family’s Favorite Games for Making Math Fun
There are great games available for older elementary students, too! Commercial games that naturally sharpen mental math that my family has loved include
ONO 99 Card Game: Sharpen Your Mental Math!
Get ready for fast-paced fun with ONO 99, the exciting card game that will supercharge your mental addition and subtraction with 2-digit numbers. Players take turns adding to a running total, aiming to stay under 99 while strategically using special cards like REVERSE, DRAW 2, and MINUS 10 to outwit opponents. It’s an easy-to-learn game perfect for family game night or travel, where every move hones your math skills!
Sharpen Your Senses with Blink
Race to match cards by shape, count, or color in the lightning-fast game of Blink, a head-to-head competition for two players. This vibrant card game is designed to sharpen your pattern-matching abilities and enhance visual processing as you quickly identify similarities between symbols like moons, triangles, and stars. Play all your cards first to win, and watch your reflexes improve with every round!
Master Logic and Patterns with SET
Race to find the most SETs in this award-winning card game by matching colors, shapes, shadings, or the number of shapes. SET is ideal for all ages, effectively strengthening logic and pattern recognition as players quickly identify if features are all the same or all different. Perfect for family game nights or on-the-go fun, it offers engaging play for one or more players.
Master Probability with Can’t Stop
The Can’t Stop bundle challenges players to push their luck while keenly considering probability in every roll. In the classic board game, you’ll roll four dice to form pairs, advancing markers up columns, and deciding when to risk losing your turn’s progress. Its portable companion, Can’t Stop Express, further hones your strategic thinking by requiring you to choose the optimal two-pair combination from five dice, emphasizing risk assessment and the understanding of likelihoods to score the most points.
Boost Mental Addition with Yahtzee
Yahtzee is a classic dice game where players roll five dice up to three times to achieve various scoring combinations. This engaging game significantly strengthens mental addition skills as players constantly calculate sums for categories like “Aces,” “Twos,” and “Sixes,” or total all five dice for “3 of a Kind,” “4 of a Kind,” and “Chance.” Strategic choices in each round require quick calculation, making it a fun workout for the mind.
Enhance Mental Math & Addition Families with Shut the Box
Shut the Box is a timeless wooden dice game for up to four players that offers more than just entertainment; it’s a powerful tool for sharpening mathematical skills. Players roll the dice and “shut” corresponding number tiles, actively strengthening mental addition and subtraction with every turn as they combine numbers to match their roll. This engaging process also intuitively reinforces the understanding of addition families, as players continuously identify pairs or groups of numbers that sum to a given total.
Headbands: Math Edition
This game is a fan favorite for practicing math facts, and in a way that is more fun than a worksheet! It can be a great way to pass some time on a long car trip. All you need is a standard pack of cards and three players. (If you want, you can add the actual headbands with a set like this.)
Take all the face cards out of a standard deck. Two people each draw a single card from the deck and, without looking at the card, hold it face out on their forehead. The third person, who alone can see both cards, says a number based on the two cards.
- If you want to practice addition and subtraction, add the numbers and say the sum out loud. If the cards are a 3 and a 5, say “8”.
- If you want to practice multiplication and division facts, multiply the two numbers and say the product out loud. If the cards are a 3 and a 5, say “15”.
Each of the other two players races to figure out the card he is holding on his forehead. If you are holding a 3 and the cards add up to 8, my card must be 5!
Bonus round: If you have middle school students who need to practice arithmetic with positive and negative numbers, the Headbands game can be easily adapted. Just call the red cards positive numbers and the black cards negative numbers!
Play Your Way to Math Success This Summer
Play is an excellent way to learn; it provides unbeatable motivation for children to master skills from counting and number recognition to multiplication and geometry. Incorporate a little mental math play into summer activities and fight the “summer slide” with opportunities for children to use the skills that they worked so hard to build during the school year. Happy summer and have fun!
You may also enjoy…
