Math Fun During the Summer

If you use the words ‘math’ and ‘fun’ and ‘summer’ all in the same sentence, how will your grandchildren react?

Will they crinkle up their nose and say “blech?”

Maybe so. But I hope not.

When your children were in school, you probably heard teachers moan how children lose their reading and math skills during the summer break. Well, here are two games that will make math fun — and as you play them with your grandchildren it will help them retain their math skills.

Math Tic Tac Toe

Everybody knows how to play tic tac toe, right? Good. Then I won’t have to write any directions. But here’s a twist that adds a dollop of math to the game.

Draw a tic tac toe grid. Fill in the squares with math problems: addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. A player has to correctly do the math problem before they can put an X or O in the square.

When they get three Xs or Os in a row, they win the game — just like regular tic tac toe.

I thought that I would help you out a bit. I created a tic tac toe sheet of multiplication problems for the numbers six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.(I used those numbers because it seems that grandchildren can rather easily learn their times tables for numbers up to five but struggle with the higher numbers.)

All you have to do is print up a tic tac toe sheet and play with a grandchild.

But what if your grandchild is just learning to add? Or to subtract? Or divide? Or you want to practice different multiplication problems? Never fear! I created a blank tic tac toe sheet for you to use. Simply print it off and put in the math problems of your choice and then play.

Math Bowling

Since this is a trickier game, older grandchildren would probably enjoy playing this game more than younger ones. Here’s what you do.

Print off one of my math bowling sheets. (Aren’t I nice to make all of these pages for you?!?)

Get three dice. Have your grandchild roll all three of them at once. Then, using either addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems, see how many of the numbers 1 through 10 that she can come up with. She can use all of the dice in her problem or only 2 dice. (You can’t use just one dice because you can’t do a math problem with just one number!)

When she comes up with one of the numbers, she crosses it off her bowling sheet. She keeps doing as many math problems as she can until she can’t figure out any more numbers.

Then it’s grandma’s turn to roll the dice and grandma does math problems to see what numbers she can come up with.

Here is an example to show you how it works. Say your granddaughter rolled a 3, 4, and a 5. If she added the 4 and the 5 together, her answer would be a 9 so she can cross off the 9 ‘pin.’

If she divided 4 by 5, she would get .8 for an answer. Then, if she multiplied .8 by 3, she would get 2.4. If she rounded the number up, she would get the number three.  (You’ll have to decide if you can do stuff like rounding numbers up . . .) Then, she could cross off the number 3 on her bowling sheet.

If she multiplied the 3 and the 4, she would get 12. Then, if she subtracted the 5 from 12, she would get 7. She could then cross off her 7 ‘pin.’

She would keep doing as many of these types of problems that she could think of to see how many of the numbers she could cross off her bowling sheet. When she can’t come up with any more unique numbers to cross off, it’s grandma’s turn to roll the dice.

The game ends when someone has crossed out all of their ‘pins’ or when they have ‘bowled’ ten ‘frames’ ( or turns).

If your grandchildren do not live close by, you can either print up and mail some pages to them or e-mail them the PDF files.

You could also play together over Skype.

Here’s to a fun-filled and a math-filled summer together with your grandchildren!