While math can seem more difficult to keep up with during the summer, ResponsiveEd’s director of mathematics has a few family-fun suggestions on how to retain and develop math knowledge during the summer. She highly recommends multiplication games since fact fluency is one of the first causalities of a long summer vacation.
Multiplication War: Use playing cards. Throw down two cards. The person who finds the product of the two cards first keeps the pair.
Math with Cards and Dice
- Educational Card Games to Teach Math
- Marilyn Burns’ Favorite Dice Games
- Math Games For Skills and Concepts
Board Games
What better way to practice logic and math skills than while having fun? Below are a few suggested games the whole family can play to keep their math and logic skills sharp during the summer.
| Basic Operations | Patterns & Geometry | Strategy Games | Logical Reasoning: | Probability | Coordinate Graphing |
| Monopoly | Sequence | Mancala | Clue | Deal or No Deal? | Battleship |
| Life | Blokus | Othello | Stratego | ||
| Payday | Geoshapes | Connect | Sudoku | ||
| S’Math | Quirkle | Chess | |||
| Tripoley | Checkers |
Online Games:
| All Math Operation Areas | Factors or Multiples | Angles (fractions and geometry) | Logic games | Multiplication games |
| Arcademic Skill Builders
|
Factors & Multiples Jeopardy | Math Playground | Math Maven’s Mysteries | Multiplication.com |
| Johnnie’s Math Page | Penguin Jump | |||
| Rush Hour | Multiplication Grand Prix |
Real-life Math Activities: The biggest complaint of students is that in real life they will never use the math they learn at school. Here are some great summer ways of showing them how they will use math in everyday life.
- Take a Vacation!
- Use an atlas and figure out how many miles you’ll be driving – the scale of miles is a great example of proportion and measurement used in real life.
- What’s your car’s fuel efficiency? Add to find out the total cost to fill up the tank throughout your trip; divide to calculate the miles driven per gallon of gas; multiply to determine the cost of a fill-up based on your expected travel distance.
- How fast did you get there? Use the car’s trip odometer to find out how many miles you’ve driven, and determine your average speed.
- Gardens of Eating… and Math!
- How big is that garden? How much fencing is needed to keep out the deer? How much fertilizer do you need to keep the garden (or yard) growing?
- How much mulch do you need to order if you want to put it down 3” thick in your flower beds?
- What is the weight of that prize-winning tomato or pumpkin?
- How many peppers are on the pepper plant? If you need to keep your bean plants 3 inches apart, how many plants will grow on a 12-foot row? How many seeds should you plant?
- Go to the supermarket or farmer’s market and find out the cost of fresh vegetables you can grow at home. How much money will you save if you grow it yourself?
- Take me out to the ballgame!
- Take in a summer baseball game – either at the ballpark or on TV. Baseball’s a natural place to see math in action – from a pitcher’s ERA to a hitter’s on-base percentage. Record the events of the game using a scorecard. To find out all about how to keep score, go to Patrick McGovern’s fantastic website: The Baseball Scorecard. Then, calculate some statistics about your favorite players. If you like baseball, run your own team! Check out Fantasy Baseball and Math. (You can also play fantasy football and soccer, too.)
- Take a trip to the grocery store!
- Estimate the total bill based on the prices of what you are purchasing.
- How much does that bunch of bananas weigh? How much will it cost?
- What is the unit price of your favorite box of cereal? What is the unit of measurement, and how much is the total cost of that box?
- In the kitchen – cook up some math!
- Measure all of the ingredients.
- Challenge yourself to double the recipe or cut the recipe in half – fractions are everywhere.
