Homeschool Math Games
Fun Ways to Learn Basic Arithmetic
Playing with numbers can help your child develop a real sense of how they work together, which can lead to a better understanding of arithmetic, and, later, higher mathematics. Here are a few homeschool math games to get your kids excited about math lessons.
Kinetic Activities for Math
Skip count or recite times tables while jumping rope or dong jumping jacks.
Go outside and measure your yard or another nearby area. This will give kids a much better idea of what fifty feet or twenty-five meters means.
Draw a very large number line with chalk on your pavement outside. Have the child start on a number of his choice, then tell him to "add two" or "subtract five." This is an especially good way to introduce negative numbers.
Send the kids outside with pails of water and plastic measuring cups. Have them find out for themselves what 1/2 + 1/4 means.
Collect all the change in the house and use it to play store. Real coins keep their interest better than fake ones. Fake bills can be printed from the Internet.
Draw a number line on narrow paper, like adding machine tape. Make the numbers several centimeters apart. Use toy cars or people to move along the number line and find the answers to equations.
When the child is first learning multiplication or addition, hang a chart across the room from the school area. Have the child get up and walk to look for the answer to the problem at hand. This will make him have to repeat the answer to himself as he walks across the room. After a few trips, the answer will be connected with the problem and memorized.
Math Games
Play Twenty-one...or Ten, or Forty-two. Pick a number as the goal. Deal everyone two cards face down. Let children look at them to decide whether they need another card or cards to reach the goal number without going over. They can ask for another card, or more if they wish, until they are as close as they can get. The winner is the one who gets closest or hits it exactly without going over.
Use your multiplication flash cards to play War. Divide the deck in half, then have both players turn over their top card at the same time. The one whose card has the highest answer to the multiplication problem wins those cards. Keep going until one person has all the cards.
Write the kind of problems you are studying on cutouts of fish. Put a paper clip on the mouth of each fish, then "fish" for them with a pole that has a magnet tied on to it. The child gets to keep the fish if he or she knows the answer to the problem.
Math Puzzles
Introduce basic number order to younger kids with dot-to-dot puzzles, which can be found for free on many websites.
Search the Internet for easy Kakuro or Cross Sum puzzles. These are good for kids ten and up, and will help the child learn to do basic addition very quickly.
Use graph paper to design rooms, houses, barns, dream hamster cages, etc.
Measure a room in your home and draw it to scale on graph paper. Add to-scale furniture also.
Find large-scale recipes online – the ones for fifty or one hundred people. have your child scale them down for your family.
These are all wonderful ways to keep last year's learning fresh during the summer break without having it feel so much like "school". Have a bit of fun with numbers and learn at the same time!
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