Sum It Up

What You Need:

• Deck of playing cards (with the face cards removed)
• Index cards
• Pen or marker
• A different type of counters for each player. The more players you have, the less of each kind of counter you'll need. If you're only playing with 2 people, to be safe you'll need at least 100 counters for each player (we used different kinds of beans, but you could also use coins or torn-up pieces of paper of different colors).

What You Do:

1. Write the numbers 1-10 on the index cards.
2. Lay the index cards on a flat surface, making sure they're far enough apart from one another so that if there's any counter spill over, it's no big deal.
3. Shuffle the playing cards and place them face down in a pile.
4. For the purposes of this game, aces= 1.
5. Players take turns drawing a card. Once a card is drawn, the player should place a counter on the number value of the card.
6. Then, they must figure out which numbers can be used to create sums that equal the value of the card. (For example, if a player draws an 6, they could cover up "6", "1" and "5", "2" and "4", and "3.")
7. Now for the catch! Each player has only 10 seconds to say their number and the sums equal to their number aloud and place their counters on the index cards.
8. Once there are no more cards left, players should tabulate how many counters they used. The player who's used the most counters wins.

​Once your kid has mastered addition, have him try out some subtraction. Play this game again, but instead of finding numbers for sums, he should mark the numbers that can be used to create differences.