Building Brains with Board Games

Number sense is an important building block that leads into other math competencies, such as composing and decomposing numbers. As students develop their understanding of this concept, the use of manipulatives, such as Base Ten blocks, helps to create a visual representation of numbers. During this process, students move from a hands-on, concrete understanding to the more abstract, written representation throughout the number sense unit. This helps when students work toward comparing numbers using inequality symbols, such as greater than and less than.

Lower School students play many games to help build their number sense and place value understanding, such as card games, dice games, and trading games. They also practice representing numbers with various manipulatives, which helps them to practice and extend their skills. This process doesn’t just develop in the younger grades. Students are consistently building and growing their number sense skills. Board games are a great way to do this!

One favorite example is the game Race to 100, where students compete against the teacher to roll a dice and make trades for ones and tens. You can play this game at home using small objects such as Legos, beans, candy or cereal. Designate one item to be the ten and another item to stand for ones. It helps if the items are different colors or shapes. As students roll the dice and begin collecting ones, have them trade them in for a group of ten as they build their collection. This game helps reinforce the visual representation of tens and ones. Whoever gets to 100 first is the winner! Want to reinforce subtraction concepts? Have students play Race to Zero instead!

Playing board games helps reinforce problem solving and critical thinking skills, counting and number sense, cooperative learning, and sportsmanship. Break out Monopoly to work on money counting skills. Children will enjoy Mancala which reinforces counting and strategy building. All games with dice help students build their subitizing skills. Yahtzee is a great game that helps to reinforce mental math and addition. Open up your game closet and create your own family fun while strengthening number sense, too!