I always feel the need to preface what I share about homeschooling strategies with the following: My kids have been attending public school since January of '09. The struggles with our special needs child along with the advice and council of his doctors led us that direction. It's likely only a temporary situation, but my kids are doing very well in school and our son who is on the autism spectrum has made great strides... mostly socially as he was in desperate need of peer modeling.
Ok... now on with my post! lol My son brought home a game that he was instructed to share with me and now I'm excited to share it with you. Whether you're just now introducing multiplication to your student, or trying to reinforce the skill in a student you've already been working with, you've got to try this!
The game is called "Circles and Stars". All you need to play is a pair of dice and pencil & paper.
- Have your child roll his/her dice. Then have him/her take that number and draw it out in circles on a sheet of paper. Have him/her also write the actual number (start of the equation) down below the circles.
- Now you roll the second dice. Take whatever number you roll and draw that number of stars inside each of the circles your child drew. Then have him/her write your number after his to complete the math sentence: "his/her number" X "your number" =
- Have him/her determine the answer by counting all the stars.
My son for example rolled a 4, I rolled a 5... so he drew 4 circles and I drew 5 stars inside each of those circles. He then counted by 5's to get his answer after having that visual before him. If he'd been stuck... he could have just counted all the stars and had his answer.
This gives the child the opportunity to see more than just numbers when learning to solve a multiplication problem. It teaches adding as a step to multiplication! It's a simple game and super affordable. Nothing to buy but the dice!
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