Math Monday::Fun Games!

Posted by tiff in Math Mondays | 3 comments

It’s been a while, right?! Not only for a bloggy update (so sorry! I’ve been so sick! And so tired! And mostly sick!), but for one of these math monday posts!

As for the lack of MM posts, I’ll let you in on a secret. When unschooling, often my attention or the kids attention will veer away from the subject with a capital M “Math” into the subject with a lowercase L “life”.

When we moved away from Colorado, it was the end of our Math Club, which we’re all still sad about. And with all the moving and traveling and moving and traveling this past year, we haven’t dove into our ‘math box’–the place with all our mathy supplies–to pick up any kind of math exploration in the way that schools would recognize it…planned study with a specific math focus.

A couple years ago this would have freaked me out and led to sleepless nights of parental angst about if I was impeding my children’s growth and development by not having them actively memorize their multiplication tables and pass tests about it.

Now, I recognize that math is everywhere in the world. Golfer loves his playstation NBA 2011 basketball game mostly because he can be the GM and trade players around to build an awesome team. Working with numbers, budgets, statistics, etc….it’s all math. They aren’t doing math drills, but they are building their mathmatical skills in everything they do. Happily. And more importantly, they have a neutral if not happy and easy relationship with numbers…even Naturalist and her dyscalculia…which is far far better than having an adversarial or bored relationship with them.

I share this just to poke my hand up out of the sea of masses doing math the old fashioned way…drills, workbooks, school, homework, tests…to say it doesn’t really have to be that way. Math literacy can come another way; through cooking, sewing, investigating, experimenting, building, questioning, and (my favorite!) playing!

I’ve noticed that dice games are played pretty frequently here, and dice in any form = math, so I thought I’d share our favorite, always out on the table, games.

Yahtzee is always fun, but made even more so in a giant M&M! And we’re always up for tic tac toe.

Shut the Box is also in heavy play around here. I like this one because it goes up to 12 instead of 10:

but this one is the best if you have up to 4 people who want to go head to head in shut the box deathmatch:

Then there are dice activity books, even though kids will make up a lot of games on their own if you only get some dice in their hands. But some of these games are pretty fun, too!

for younger kids:

For older kids:

There’s dice for every occasion:

Honestly, you can forget all those things in favor of one magical collection. A collection of 100 die. Because if you’ve never held a pound of various kinds of dice in your hands, then you haven’t lived yet. Or your kids. Mine will sit with all these dice spread out and made up their own dice games (with is always heavy on the math computation, in a fun beside-the-point way!) for hours at a time.

If you have all the polyhedra dice you can stand, then we also enjoy these dice-within-a-dice:

I’ve discovered that playing math is much more productive than doing math. Try it if you haven’t already, especially if you have a kid that is math reluctant.

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