This summer, whenever our 6 and 11-year-old kids would come to us saying, ‘we’re bored!’, we encouraged them to play ‘War‘, the very simple card game which requires just a deck of cards and two players. Eventually, this game became a bit boring for them, so we encouraged them to play a more advanced version: ‘addition war’.
Basically, instead of putting down one card, you put down two cards, and whoever has the largest sum of cards wins the war and takes all the cards… and you continue playing like the original version until one player has all the cards. (In this version of the game, Aces are 1, Jacks are 11, Queens are 12 and Kings are 13.)
For older kids, you can even play ‘multiplication war’, where you put two cards down and multiply the numbers. Our 14-year-old, who doesn’t love maths, actually found this to be a really helpful exercise in memorising her multiplication table! I love when learning is fun like this.
We also played the card game, Golf, as a family, and this too is a fun way to get kids doing simple addition.
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