Have you ever played Yahtzee? I used to play it a lot growing up with my family - especially on holidays, and I loved it! I decided to give it a go with my girls, and to my delight found that they too love it! To make it a bit more special, I made an extra set of dice for them, and a scoreboard - so they can play it out in the garden!! (if you're interested in how to make your own - click here to go to the tutorial on my other blog) The dice are about 15 cm square foam blocks I covered. The scoreboard is painted with chalkboard paint so they can score and rub out for the next game. As a child I remember playing this game and having fun - nothing more. But as a parent, playing it with my kids, I see what a great mathematical tool it is. Number recognition, adding, patterning and multiplication (times tables) all come into play. For those of you who've never played. Basically you get three goes rolling the 5 dice to get various combinations which will ultimately get you the highest score you can. For example you may roll 2 sixes on your first throw, keep those and roll the other 3 dice for your second throw - on which say you get another six, then you roll your last 2 dice for the final time and get one more six and a two. So you'd have 4 sixes and 1 two. Which would mean you could score this in sixes and get (4x6) 24, or in 4 of a kind and get (4x6=24 +2) 26. Don't worry if that sounds confusing - My 7 and 5 year old grasped it all pretty quickly once we started playing. I still help them a bit with some numbers, and check their overall addition at the end, but as it's a game, they're happy to do it themselves!! Of course the best score you can get is all five dice the same number, which is a YAHTZEE!!! Brilliant game - great fun and a great number workout for us all! Have you ever played?
