Thank-you, Peggy Kaye

I try to learn from my mistakes. I’m still not feeling all that well and I didn’t want to have a repeat of what happened last Friday. Instead of re-introducing that math concept in the same boring way I decided to turn to my Games for Math book by Peggy Kaye. I found the perfect game. It’s called Group Ten. The paper game boards are divided into three columns. Reds (hundreds), blues (tens), and yellows (ones/units). Next time we’ll use green for units since that coincides with the Math U See manipulatives.

We used corresponding coloured buttons for markers, and then one red marker. You also need a deck of cards with the jokers and picture cards removed. She says to remove the tens, but we left them in. The object of the game is to get the one red marker.

To play: Take a card from the deck. Let's say you draw a four. You put 4 yellow markers in the yellow column. When you get to ten yellow markers you exchange them for a blue marker which goes into the blue column. You continue this way until you collect ten blue markers and finally exchange that for the red marker.

It’s a great way to teach place value and addition rules. She also has a subtraction variation. Or play with pennies, dimes, and dollars. We’ll give that one a try later. We had fun playing, and I could see the light turn on in ds’s eyes which was the point.