Four in a Row

I used a math curriculum last year called Right Start and this year we are afterschooling with it as well.  It is a really inspiring and fun curriculum.  It has been a good fit for our 6 year old.  We don’t do a lot of worksheets, but we play a lot of games to reinforce concepts. I am always looking for fun, engaging, and sneaky educational ideas.

You can adapt this game to many different math skills. We usually work on addition, but today I wanted my little little guy to play along and I wanted to reinforce the bigger little guy’s number sense.  So we we worked on number recognition and number sense.  Both kids played together, but were working on different skills.  I used the cards I found at Ms. Preppy as my deck to pull from. This game  could be adapted for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Really the options are limitless. I used card stacks for number sense and recognition, but I use regular dice for addition.

I took two colors of poker chips ( I had these laying around for another craft project and never got to them- so they were free for me at that point.  I am pretty cheap, so I am guessing these were not very expensive) and labeled them 1-12.

Next I took a piece of white card stock and a poker chip and traced the poker chip.  I made two sets of horizontal lines. Each line contains a row of 4 traced poker chip spaces.

I give my kids a bag with their color of poker chips.  They each pull out 5 chips.  You can let them pick their favorite number or just grab a handful.  That is up to you. Since we were working on numbers 1-10 only, I picked 11 and 12 out of the bag.  When we are working on addition, I keep them in.

They should both have 5 chips to start.  This helps to make it a little less frustrating for my younger kids. You could have them pick just 4 chips.

The object of the game is to be the first person to get four in a row.  I had each child pick a card from the stack and compare it to their chips.  If there was a match, they placed the chip on the board.  When we are playing with addition one player rolls the dice.  They add the dice together and get a number (I let my child use his abacus for this).  They see if this number matches one of the five chips they have.  If it does they put it on their four in a row grid.  Whether they have a match or not each player only goes once in a turn.  Next player rolls or picks a card… same thing again.  The first person to get four in a row wins.

This is a simple and fun way to practice math facts.  It also helps the kids gain confidence in math.  Try it and let me know how it works for you.

I am linking up to Math Mondays.