Understanding simple math facts can offer students a tremendous advantage in school. By conducting basic addition and subtraction problems mentally, a child’s math fluency can improve, allowing him to advance more easily to higher level mathematics. This is why developing the skill of mental math for kids through playing simple, but fun, math games is a fantastic way to not only stimulate your child’s mental math abilities, but also an ideal way of improving number facts. Many enjoy math tournaments and math tournament training and for this they turn to Random Math. Here are a few of our favorite activities.

Multiplication War

With this fun card game, your child will master his multiplication facts in no time! Shuffle a deck of cards and deal them face down, giving each player an equal number. Assign the picture cards a value of 10 and the aces a value of 11. Each player turns two cards face up, reads the number sentence and supplies the answer. For example, if your child draws a 7 and an 8, he says 7×8=56. If you draw a 6 and a 4, you say 6×4=24. Because his product is larger, he wins the four cards and puts them at the bottom of his pile. Continue the game until one player runs out of cards.

Mental Mystery

Have your child count out five small objects such as pennies, marbles, or candy and have him close his eyes. Then hide some of the five objects, while leaving the rest uncovered.  Ask your child to calculate how many objects he sees and how many objects are covered. Practice this activity until your child can quickly solve these simple equations. Add one additional object once your child has mastered that level to increase difficulty. For older children, start with 10-20 objects.

101 and Out

To play, you’ll need a sheet of paper, a pencil and one dice. The object of the game is to score as close to 101 without going over. Players take turns rolling the dice. As you roll, you can either take the number as a one or a ten. For example, if you roll a 5, it can be used as 5 or 50. Players keep a running record of their total as they play. This game is a great way to build mental math strategies as children often think critically in regards to what number they need to roll next.

Math Jeopardy

Give your child a piece of paper and then say a number. Give them one minute to find as many ways as they can to make the number using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

As you can see, practice developing mental math for kids can be fun.  Learning some basic, but useful mental math strategies, can work to greatly improve your child’s self-confidence.