So a few years ago, my mom shared with me this idea around only getting your kids four things at Christmas. It includes something they want, something they need, something to wear and something to read. 

Now, I’ve always wondered why something to read? Why not something to math? 

I’m Christina Tondevold, the recovering traditionalist, so today, we are going to look at some fun and educational gifts that build math minds in our quest to build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our students.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

Here are links to products/activities mentioned in this vlog. (Some may be affiliate links which just means that if you do purchase using my link, the company you purchased from sends me some money. Find more info HERE about that.)

• Prime Climb
• NFL Showdown
• Savvy Subitizing Cards
• Q-bitz
• Books by Greg Tang

Now, I am not against getting your child something to read. I actually do every single Christmas, give my kids a new book, but I just want to put it out there like why aren’t we encouraging, getting things to math with? Let’s get some mathy gifts. 

So these items can be for your own children, they can maybe something that you do for a classroom gift if you do that sort of thing, or maybe just dropping a hint to like your PTA that some teachers may need these kinds of things for their classroom. 

If you’re a parent watching this, then maybe this would be something that you could give your child’s teacher at Christmas time, because you know, sometimes coffee mugs, any gift is great, but I would just want to encourage you to do something that will help build a child’s math mind this Christmas.  So there’s these certain types of categories that I wanted to share with you. 

Logic & Board Games

My first one is some kind of logic or board game. So the reason I think these are so great is because basically, it just builds logic skills, thinking skills. This is an excellent piece to get kids ready for mathematical thinking, is the logic behind it. Also, so many of these board games and logic games have lots of practice built into it. Lots of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, are part of these games. 

There are a ton that you can go and find, but I want to encourage you, if you’re getting a board game, find a board game that has numbers on the board. Most board games are just spaces that you land on that don’t have numbers, but when you can find a board game that has numbers like Chutes and Ladders, Prime Climb is another great one for older elementary kids and middle school kiddos. Anything that has numbers on the board, just brings things to a new level. One of our personal favorites here lately, has been the game NFL Showdown.

This is a picture of my son and I playing it, well you don’t see me but just my son, and the cool part about this game is that it has so much number sense built into the game and the model of a number line, which is a very huge model that we use. Now my son is in 1st grade right now, and it’s not recommended a lot, it’s somewhat difficult for Kindergarten 1st grade kids to get the idea of a number line down, but this is a great game to help with it, and as you can see, the whole game board the football field, in and of itself is a number line, and then the way that the game is set up your scoreboard is a number line as well. 

I know that this game is not for every kid, but if you have a football-loving kid, this is a great game for that, but again, any board game, take a look at it and see if it’s got numbers on that board game, and it just brings it to a whole new level for students

Cards & Dice

Our second category is anything that deals with cards or dice. Any card or dice game is going to be huge for your kids because there’s just so much math built into those. My personal favorite though, is using these cards called Savvy Subitizing Cards. 

These are cards that I personally created, because I didn’t like how regular decks of cards don’t show the quantity.

If you picture a regular deck of cards, it has the digit, and then it has, you know, diamonds, clubs, whatever, but the hard part of a regular deck of cards, is let’s say you have the card for five. Well, it doesn’t show five diamonds, it actually shows seven diamonds because of the ones in the corners, and so oftentimes kids aren’t actually looking at the amount that’s on the card, they’re just looking at the digit. 

So these Savvy Subitizing Cards show the quantities of the amount. This picture is showing all the ways in the deck of cards that we show the numbers. It’s got 10 frames and rekenrek, and tally marks, and it does have the digit and other things in there, finger patterns, but it’s to help kids see the quantities, and it shows all the quantities from zero through 10 in that deck of cards, and you can play, there in the deck, it gives you some ideas of games that you can play, but you can play any game, any game that you normally play with a deck of cards, when you play using Savvy Subitizing Cards just takes it to a whole new level. 

And like I said, you can really play any game out there, but one of our personal favorites, is the game 1 through 10. So I’m going to show you a little video that we made quite a few years ago actually of my kids playing 1 through 10 with the Savvy Subitizing Cards, just so you can see one of the favorite games and see how these cards can be used. (Watch the video about the game 1 through 10 by going to the above video and skip ahead to 5:35 to see how it is played.)

Spatial Reasoning Toys (blocks or puzzles)

Okay, our next category is any type of game puzzle, anything that builds spatial reasoning. It can be even just toys like building blocks, anything where kids are having to manipulate and try to visualize things. So research has shown that spatial reasoning is one of the biggest predictors of future success in mathematics.

So again, any game, puzzle, building block type of thing.  But one of my personal favorites is the game Q-bitz. Q-bitz is where you are trying to build these patterns, and there are different rounds. So one of the rounds is like just based on speed who can build it the fastest, and if you have young kids, you may need to modify that a little bit, but one of my favorite rounds is the round where you only show the pattern for 10 seconds, then you flip the card over and then everybody has to try to recreate it from memory. 

Being able to encourage your children, your students, to hold amounts in their head is going to pay off big time to help them with mathematics later. 

Books

Alright, my last category of fun and educational gifts that build math minds, is books. I know I said that you didn’t need to do the “read”, but this is like a two for one. Then I can do the books and the mathy thing together, but there are so many math books out there that it’s hard for me to choose.  But one of the classic ones I think works, no matter what grade your kids are, are the books by Greg Tang. 

This is one of them, but any of Gregg Tang’s books are really, really fabulous. 

They have a visual picture that then he gives a little poem about to try to figure out something in the picture, some amount, and it’s so it’s all a lot like a lot of subitizing work as they get, some of them have things where they’re showing arrays that kids are starting to build their understanding of multiplication and division through these patterns, just fabulous books, no matter what grade your students are. 

So it’s not like we need to get rid of the “something to read”, but I just would love it if all the time it wasn’t just read, read, read, read, read, like that we just encourage people to also do math and do mathy things. So I hope that these four categories of fun and educational gifts can help you build your student’s math minds. Have a great day.