Summer Math Drills

(The following is a video transcript. Scroll down to watch the video if you prefer.)

Hope: Hi! It’s summertime here at Timberdoodle. We’ve been getting questions about what we can do with our children to reinforce the math concepts they’ve learned all year without getting the math books out during the summer. So we have brought out some of our recommended math games. Let’s walk through them really quickly. Pearl, do you want to lead off with Mobi?

Pearl: Sure. Mobi is sort of a Scrabble-type game where each player is creating their own crossword using math equations. There’s a Mobi Max and Mobi Kids. Mobi Max includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It’s a little bit more challenging for maybe eight and up or the child who is getting somewhat comfortable with multiplication and division. Mobi Kids is better for maybe, say, five or six and up, for a child who’s really comfortable doing addition and subtraction. Mobi Kids is best for either two players or two teams of players, whereas Mobi Max is good for a very flexible number of players. Especially if you have a variety of ages in your family, Mobi Max is perfect because we’ve included, exclusive to us, extra addition and subtraction tiles. So it’s good both for the older or more advanced child and for a younger child who wants to play at the same time.

Hope: Perfect. Another product we have is Tenzi. It’s four colors of dice, 10 dice in each color. Let me show you that. Tenzi can be played in a number of different ways. We actually sell the Tenzi Card Deck in case you run out of ideas on how to play it. The main concept is you can use these dice to reinforce addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division from the very basic of having your child roll and count how many dots are on each side of the dice to adding with it. For example, everyone rolls until you can add up to 8, or everyone rolls until you can add up to 12. You can also roll for numbers that divide by 3. So I’ve got 12 can be divided by 3 and so on. There are many ways to play Tenzi. Again, you can look at the deck if you run out of ideas or take all your math concepts and turn them into competition. It’s really a very addictive game. Pearl, do you want to look at Tiny Polka Dot?

Pearl: Tiny Polka Dot has so much variety to the game for a wide range of ages—lots of different games that you can play with helpful recommendations on them. For example, let’s look at one game that you can play with Tiny Polka Dot with probably about a four- or five-year-old. You lay out numbers with dots from 0 to 5 on it and you are looking for pairs that add up to 5. It might be a 0 and a 5. It might be a and a 3. It might be a 4 and a 1. This can be quite challenging for a young player. But when it gets a little too easy, you just flip the cards over, and now it’s a memory challenge. Those are just two examples of the myriad games that can be played with Tiny Polka Dot.

Hope: Awesome. The last one we want to look at is called Wrap-Ups. This is not a math game, but it does allow your child to practice their math facts very quickly and easily, and with a hands-on approach, it keeps you from having to break out the books. Let me walk you through it here. This is the multiplication one. You are going to be using this string here. Basically, you’re solving for the problem. This is all times 1. 4 times 1 is 4. 2 times 1 is 2. Starting on one side, wrapping to the answer on the other side. 12 times 1 is 12 and so on. The beauty of Wrap-Ups is you can self correct. I don’t know if you can see, on the back there are ridges that your child will be able to be able to see. If the string is on top of the ridge you got the answer correct. If the string is not on the ridge then he’s going to know that that answer was not correct. Again, a real quick way for your child to practice whatever math facts you want them to keep sharp on during the summer and get it done in just a real fun way.

That about covers it for math for us. Thanks for joining us.