Fun Quick Math Counting Game

Sometimes in your homeschool math lessons (huh, I need to make a landing page for that, I don’t have a lot, but I have enough) you need a quick, easy game to get the point across.  This was part of our homeschool Christmas lessons, but that’s only because I had Christmas stickers.  It could just as easily have been dogs; I have lots of dog stickers.

 

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Materials Needed for Math Counting Game:

rewards stickers* (these work well for this math game because they are small), dice* (this set is overkill, but there are many activities you can do with dice, and these are just awesome), grid sheet of some sort(graph paper works great,  I used a blank table I made in Word)

 

How to play this quick math counting game:

Each person rolls the dice and adds that number of stickers to their page.  The first person to fill up their sheet wins.  It’s that easy.

 

Adapting the math counting game for different ages:

First off, if you don’t know it, dice come in different sizes than just six-sided.

Common types of dice you can get: 4-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, 12-sided, 20-sided. The dice I linked to on Amazon has all of these types.

There is also a 100-sided dice, but truthfully, it’s a little hard to read.  If you want to work in numbers up to 100, I’d get two 10-sided dice and designate one to be 10s and the other 1s.  There are also 10-sided dice sold that are printed with 10s already on them.  You can also buy large dice.  I have a couple of large 10-sided dice and some large 6-sided dice.

Now, what does that mean for adapting it?  Well, my kids are still working on counting, so as they get more comfortable, I would move them up from a 6-sided dice to one that goes higher.

If your child is working on addition, have them roll two dice or several.  Next time, I’m probably going to dig up the big 10-sided and use that one because the boys are ready for that.

Another thing you can get is a 6-sided dice that has different numbers printed on it.  From my teaching days, I have a six-sided dice that has 7-12 on it, and I think I also bought math operations dice* (+, -, x, hmmm, my keyboard doesn’t have a division sign on it).  You can combine this with the dice I mentioned at the beginning of the post and create complicated math problems.

For the student working on addition and subtraction, roll two 10-sided dice and the addition/subtraction dice.  Another student might be working on multiplication and division, and you use that dice.

What about the middle schooler?  In that case, have them roll a handful of dice with operations dice included.  Then they can work on order of operations (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction).

Obviously, as you are working with more complex operations, you’ll be increasing the number of boxes to fill in.

More math posts to check out

•  Snack Graphing
• Teaching Textbooks Curriculum Review
• Learn Math Fast curriculum review
• Chocolate Fractions
• Fractions lesson