Math Game: Fix The Snake

Goal: to arrange scrambled playing cards in the correct order

Materials: playing cards, with face cards and joker removed

How to play: arrange 10 playing cards in a line on a table out of order. Tell the child that the snake is broken and that to be fixed he has to be put in the correct order.

This very simple game helps children become more familiar with the ordinality of the numbers from 1 to 10. Rearranging the cards helps the child think logically. This game can be extended to using dominoes, so that some addition is required to find the value of each domino. Likewise flash cards can be used, either subtraction or addition. The latter idea is quite a bit more difficult for a pre-K to Kindergarten child as they have to do quite a bit of either addition or subtraction to see what each card is worth and those operations at this age are still a bit cumbersome. A child this age would likely need some direction and assistance to understand exactly what she needs to do to fix the snake. Keeping her attention through too lengthy operations exercises can also be a challenge, and often a strong sense of “who is going to win!” is needed to keep her interest piqued when there is much perceived drudgery involved in arriving at an answer. I believe that as she develops more of a sense of addition’s and subtraction’s place in everyday living she will be more tolerant of the process of going through these operations; it’s important at this age, I am finding, to keep multiple steps in any math game closely linked and directly related to the ultimate task. Helping her to see the multi-connectedness of each step will eventually help her to put each step in the right place and help her to understand how everything fits and reasons behind why any one such operation is used.