A Fun Game And Some Thoughts

Was playing a neat game with Penny last night. I drew two columns of ten boxes on a sheet of paper, one for her and one for me. The object of this game was to be the first to fill each of their boxes in with an X. To get an X you took a subtraction flash card, did the subtraction and decided whether the resulting number was even or odd. If it was even, you got to fill in an X. Penny beat me quite handily.

I have both addition and subtraction flash cards that we started working with about a week ago. It’s fairly straightforward to teach a child the mechanics of doing addition and subtraction but I believe that it would help her to understand just why it is that one would go through the process of subtraction – gathering 10 chips together and then taking 7 away to see how many you have left. Why do this, other than the immediate goal of laying down another X? To that end I’ve tried to show her how people use subtraction in the real world. Much to my dismay all of my examples seem forced, but even if not I don’t believe I’m explaining why subtraction is important in such a way as to provide the motivation I seek, or to thrill her with the idea of doing subtraction. (I’m talking mostly about subtraction here, because addition is a concept most children readily understand – more, more, more.)

I use the example of children on a playground. If nine children go out for recess, and three of them leave to get a drink of water, how many children are still outside playing? Perhaps this will cause her to wonder about that very same thing when she is playing at recess and some of the kids leave. Not likely, I know, as running around and doing what four-year-olds do is probably more fun than impromptu math. Still, having the idea bouncing around can’t hurt. I do notice her counting things more and more often, and rather conspicuously, at that. She also does little addition games by herself. This is great for a child of her age, but if she is simply miming the mechanics that I’ve taught her without understanding why she is doing it, then the benefits will be substantially less than they would with deeper understanding. At her age and at this stage it’s hardly a concern, but I feel the sooner she understands the rationale, the better off she’ll be later on. So examples like the playground one above are designed to show her both math in action and to give her a rationale for why it’s important to know how to add and subtract.

Another aspect of the game we played that I liked was that there were different steps she had to accomplish each turn. Keeping all of this straight is not too easy for children her age, and I noticed that she did well and was having a lot of fun whipping up on old Dad.