Card Playing Day!

It’s Card Playing Day! A day for you and your child to take advantage of the entertainment and learning that a simple deck of cards offers, after a busy holiday season.

Not only are playing cards fun, but they are helpful instructional tools. They offer tactile learning for children and are primarily used to help introduce math facts, reinforce them, or extend student thinking.

Traditional card decks provide engaging and fun practice to help students master concepts such as basic computation. At Mathnasium, we have two special sets of playing cards to teach arithmetic skills, geometric shape properties, patterns, probability, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Our numbered set contains 52 cards with the face cards removed and replaced with the numbers 0-12, whereas our shape set includes 53 cards with geometrical figures.

Playing cards are useful math tools! Use numbered sets to compare card values and their attributes (i.e., greater than, less than, equal to; ordering consecutive numbers; match similar cards) and to practice basic computational facts (i.e., find pairs of numbers to make ten; build addition facts; compare products of pairs of numbers; solve for missing parts of addition/multiplication statements). Use shape sets to help your child recognize and compare/contrast geometric shapes.

So while your family and friends are still gathered together for the holiday season, invite your loved ones of all ages to join in on the fun! And look at the different card games we shared this year in our annual holiday gift guide: SKYJO, SET, and Blink!

For more information on math-teaching tools, contact your nearest Mathnasium Learning Center. Happy card playing!