Almost Unschooling Grama

  Have you ever awoke with the answer to a problem? I was trying to think of a fun way to help my grandson recognize different forms of numerals when I went to sleep the other night. When I woke up, I had a plan for this game. I am thinking I may have seen something similar online at some time, but here it is. I'm calling it Number Sense. To begin with, I made up an image to put on the back of my cards with Canva. Then, I put 6 of them on one page of a document on Word and printed them out on cardstock. After I cut them, I made a deck of cards with 5 different representations of each of the numbers between 1 and 12 using tally marks, dominoes, number words, Roman numerals, and Arabic numerals. The game is played like Rummy. Each player is dealt 7 cards. The object of the game is to be the first player to lay down all of the cards in their hand. In order to lay down cards, a player must have at least 3 of the cards representing the same numeral or add to a set that another player ha...

  Mighty Red is now pretty much an independent adder. We started out with him on my lap as his sister and I played math games. He would move the pieces while I gave the answers. Then we moved to him copying me as I did the finger math. For the past several weeks, we have been doing the problems on our fingers together, but this week he announced that he could do this and just took off without me! When I was in school, having someone help me like I have helped Mighty Red would have been shameful and "cheating". Go ahead, help your kids "cheat". It works!

Is it just me? Or do games that your children have a hand in creating give your kids a little more interest? This is a game that the red head and I worked on a few weeks ago. To create this game, we cut  cardstock  into fourths and then placed  stickers  corresponding to each numeral I had written on the clothes pins. The redhead chose all  princess stickers  of course. I had to help her with placement and counting, but that is all part of the learning process. The object of this game is to place the right clothespin on the card. Sounds easy enough huh? Not when you are just learning to count! I mixed up the cards and had her pick one from my hand just for fun. You could lay them face down or even face up. It really doesn’t matter. The objectives of this game are the counting, identifying the numbers, and manipulating the clothes pins. Just don’t let the dog eat them! Once she picked a card, I helped her count by placing her finger on each pr...

To make this game, create a board with 15-20 squares. Then make cards just a little smaller than your squares for the count-bys your child is learning. Mix up the cards and place them on the table. Start out by flipping the cards over and placing them in the correct square. Show your child how to place his finger on each square and count by the number to find the correct square. When he is really good at it, you can make 2 sets of cards (each a different color) and play a Tic-tac-toe like game. Each person takes turns flipping one card and placing it on the board. If one person fills a row, up or down with his color cards, he is the winner. If you play until the board is full without anyone getting a row filled up, the game is tied. God Bless You All! ~ Grama Sue