We had the privilege of reviewing a math card game called
Speed! Oh boy is it fantastic! I would have to give it 5 stars for sure.
I always try to include as many hands-on activities as possible in our homeschooling. DD still has a lot of math games, but I've been less creative with LD lately as he is working hard on reinforcing his basic multiplication and division skills. Since the first day this game arrived, we've been playing 3-5 rounds of the game each day. It's a great way to learn your multiplication tables and to reinforce skip counting patterns. I highly recommend it!!
Let me describe it for you. You choose a deck to play. LD and I chose 6-speed for this round. First you divide the deck evenly among the players. Then you lay four cards out in front of you. When everyone is ready, you turn one card over in the middle to play from.
Since we were playing 6 speed the cards were all multiples of 6... 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60.
Let's say there is a 18 in the middle. Players can place a 12 or a 24 on top of the 18 card.
When you have a 6 you can place either a 60 (to work backwards) or a 12. And on a similar vein if there is a 60 in the middle you can place a 6 or a 54 on top.
Each time you use one of your four face-up cards, you can replace it with a card from the stack of cards in your hand. The object is to be the first person to lay down all your cards.
In the picture to the left you can see LD is placing a card in the middle. He'll need to quickly place 2 more cards face up (for a total of 4) to play from in front of him. I also have just 2 cards down in the picture and need to place two more face up since there are always supposed to be four in front of you (until your hand is empty).
If at any time the two cards in the middle are the same, you try to be the first to holler out "Speed!" and the other player has to pick up all the cards, shuffle them and place them back in his/her hand.
This is an exciting, quick game. LD loves it. I mean truly LOVES it! He is competitive, but to be honest I don't give him an inch... I love it too! And the reinforcement he has gotten on the skip-counting patterns is wonderful. I can see improvement on the speed with which he does his multiplication work.
I really like that each deck is its own color. It ensures that clean up is easy if a card is misplaced.
Since DD also wants to be a part of the action we have played a three person version of 2 speed. That worked well too, though the game went on longer since we all kept getting caught by the Speed! trap. We made a rule that you could choose who had to take all the cards if you were the one who hollered out "Speed!" first.
Now if you've gotten to the end of this post--thanks for reading. I think so highly of this game that I'd like to send one person their own set... just me passing on the kindness that Julie (the creator/homeschooling Mom) did for me. Just leave me a comment below (no later than midnight, Nov. 30th eastern standard time, USA) and the age of the kid/s who you'll be playing with. I'll do a drawing (probably out of hat or something, nothing fancy here) on December 1st and will let you know who the lucky winner is (be sure to check back then, you'll have 3 days to be in touch). Oh and if you live overseas, I'll even let you "enter" -- but I will probably need to have it shipped to me and then will send on, so it would take quite some time to arrive. So there's nothing fancy about this giveaway, I just want to be nice and pass along a fantastic game! And if you like the game when it arrives and if you have a blog, it'd be great if you could give it a shout out too. It is absolutely wonderful to make math so fun and to have the kids begging for more.
Disclaimer: I was sent this product to review, but all the opinions expressed here are my own. And no one asked me to give away a set, I just think it's a terrific game.
You might be interested in these related posts:
We have a bunch different
free skip counting pages over at our new location (homeschoolden.com)
Learning the Multiplication Facts:
As my daughter moved into learning her multiplication facts I looked
around for the kind of multiplication practice that would help her. The
math book she was using went through the math facts a bit too quickly
for her. She needed quite a bit of repetition and wanted bright,
colorful worksheets. I wound up making my own sets of practice pages and
games. She loved that! Be sure to check out our Multiplication Bundle
here:
Learning the Multiplication Tables 2s thru 9s.
Each of the Multiplication Math Packets
I made for ED had a different theme. And as you will see, the packets
progressed from fairly easy, straight-forward pages in the first packet
to mixed multiplication and division problems by the time she was
working on her 8s.
What order did she learn her math facts? 2s, 5s, 10s, 3s, 6s and 7s (because those skip counting songs were easy for her!), 4s, 9s, 8s.
Many of these are all on sale individually or you can buy the
bundle of all these materials. ~Liesl
