Fun Games that Sneakily Teach Your Child Math Skills

The next time you're cleaning out your game cupboard, make sure keep that incomplete deck of cards. Kids love to play with cards. Even very young little ones can be amused for a long time with a fistful of cards to turn over, look at, and drop in an old oatmeal carton (put a slit in the lid to make this even more fun). And you can use the cards for educational games for preschoolers. Here's one:

For two and three year olds:

Pull out all the twos and threes, set aside the others. Put the stack of twos and threes face down in a pile (you don't have to use cards for this, of course. You can just write numbers on squares of paper or use index cards, but why take the time for that when you might have an incomplete deck of cards to play with?). Put about ten to twenty small objects in the center of the table- such as pennies, bottle caps, milk-jug lids, sea-shells, or small stones). Each player takes turns drawing a card and removing the corresponding number of objects from the kitty.

When all the cards have been drawn the winner is the one with the most objects.

You can play again by getting out the container where all those tiny objects are supposed to live and draw cards to take turns putting them away. Whenever possible I like to make clean-up part of the game.

Later play 'War' with the cards- divide the stack up and each of you flip over your top card, face up on the table. The person with the highest number gets to take all the face up cards and add them to his stack. Play is over when one person has all the cards.

Then lay down two cards at a time, and the person with the largest sum takes the stack of face up cards.

My children have enjoyed just putting a stack of ten cards in order from the smallest to the largest. Another game they enjoyed when they were a little older was seeing how many combinations of ten they could make with the cards in their stack.

There are probably a good many other variations you and your children could come up with, with just a incomplete deck of cards and a stack of counters. Make sure, of course, that the baby doesn't swallow your counters and the toddler doesn't put beans up his nose, though. That would spoil the game.