Practicing multiplication tables in a new way.

Practicing multiplication tables in a new way.

A few days ago, I was practicing the multiplication tables with my seven year old son. He was getting tired of the multiplication flash cards, so I thought of designing a game with him. I thought that it might be interesting if we had the answer and we were trying to find the factors for it. Something different. We cut cards almost the size of playing cards and wrote the answers of all the multiplication tables 1-10. We made 42 cards. We took a playing cards deck and left only the cards with the numbers in it. Then we thought of placing some of the answer cards down. We decided to put six cards down.first_idea

We shuffled the playing cards and gave 4 to each player. (my nine-year-old son got interested by that time, so we became three players). The goal of the game was to find a pair in your cards that when multiplied gives one of the answers that are down. Then you get to keep the answer card.
Every time someone takes an answer card, we put a new one in. The playing cards in our hands were getting less too, so we decided that when you have no lucky pair you should get one more card. Then we realized that you need an even number of cards otherwise you will end up with one card at some point. So we thought that we should take two every time. But what happens when the playing cards finish? Problem solved. The pair of cards that you use for getting the answer card will be put back in the deck to be reused.
The game seemed pretty successful by that time. Everything was working out fine. Then a question arose. When will the game end?
There were two choices: 1) the game can end when one of the players uses his last pair (kind of like in UNO) and he will be the winner.
2) The game goes on until all the answer cards finish.

After playing for the fourth time we decided that the players will decide at the start how they want to end the game. There will be a short and a long game. The winner of the game will be the one who got more answer cards.

Both my boys, seven and nine years old were very excited about the game. They especially enjoyed deciding the rules and designing the game. We had a wonderful time together and I was very pleased that my seven-year-old was getting excited about practicing the time tables. He was actually motivated to memorize the tables to win against his brother! Boys… so competitive:)

When my husband came home from work they taught him the game and we all played together for a while. He was impressed and he jokingly suggested I turn the game into an iPad application or maybe even a card game to sell.

His idea seemed funny to me at that time, but the truth was that I also thought that it was a good game.

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