[wjnc]

Does anyone have tips on how to go about once you've been a few years in math games with your children (5 and 3)? The thing is that school curriculum math quickly gets boring for my 5 yr old. Not to strange since playwise we've even hit upon things like exponents and logarithms (fishes and babies do the trick). School definitely picks up and offers some additional exercises, but still.

[joaorico]

Have you tried some of the better math related apps?

Like DragonBox's Elements, Algebra and Numbers [1]? Or the ones by DuckDuckMoose, such as MooseMath [2]? KhanAcademy's very first levels might be good as well [3].

With your oldest you might try a game like Junior Catan [4], that than graduates to Catan where you can talk about the probability distribution of the sum of two dice, an essential aspect of Catan.

You could perhaps try a programming language like Scratch. Have a go at some of code.org's "games" [5] and perhaps even MIT app inventor's with your oldest? [6]

[1] https://dragonbox.com/

[2] http://www.duckduckmoose.com/educational-iphone-itouch-apps-...

[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/math/early-math

[4] https://www.catan.com/game/catan-junior

[5] https://code.org/minecraft

[6] http://www.appinventor.org/content/ai2apps/simpleApps/androi...

[aethertap]

Personally, I've found a couple of things that probably aren't what you're looking for, but have been important lessons for me. The first thing is that I found that pushing too much too early is a lot of work and has very little benefit over the long term. If you wait until they're ready to learn a concept and put it to use, picking it up is so much faster and easier that the marginal return of all that early work seems to be near zero.

That said, if it's fun then there's no harm in it and keep it up. If it ever gets to be no fun though, my advice would be to let it go until they actually need it.

As far as games go, look for something that's fun first and mathematical second. I like pencil and paper games for this. We play them together often while waiting for meals at restaurants or during other down times. Rarely do I call attention to the mathy nature of the game, it's just a fun way to "be mathematical."

The other thing I think is important (that I still have a hard time living up to myself) is to really focus on things that need open-ended exploration. Particularly for children who are in school away from home, instead of trying to reinforce what the teachers are probably already doing a good job of teaching, find ways to get your kids to investigate things on their own. Games with known optimal strategies can be a fun way to get into this because they can then go dominate at school with their new knowledge. They don't get as much opportunity for this kind of thing at school because of the necessity of teaching the mechanics of computation, but keeping their curiosity alive is a great goal to strive toward.

Some resources I like:

Martin Gardner's books

Games from http://www.papg.com/

http://www.expii.com (this is advanced stuff, but can make for fun discussions because some of the situations are neat)

The Beast Academy math curriuculum from Art of Problem Solving (starts at second grade, but when you get there I really like it). http://beastacademy.com

[danvoell]

Set is a card game that we have played with our 4 year old a few times. Its not straight up math but it gets them thinking. Set - https://www.amazon.com/SET-Family-Game-Visual-Perception/dp/...

[a_w]

Not exactly a game, but I made this app after watching a show on the benefits of doing daily basic math exercises. I think it is ideal for kids too as they get instant feedback and are able to pick operators and number ranges.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brainmath

[defen]

> we've even hit upon things like exponents and logarithms (fishes and babies do the trick).

Can you explain this part? A quick google search didn't reveal any relevant games/apps, so the only thing I can think of is that a school of fish can grow exponentially, and that a baby is the logarithm of an adult :-)

[wjnc]

Yeah exactly that, offline. We always play with paper and pencil. Fishes having babies is the analogy for drawing the first few steps of 2^x. And then reasoning about that. That went in easier than divisions. Although candy and cookies really make math more simple to reason about. I've introduced division and sets by putting candy in bags (again paper and pencil) and the empty set is trivial for kids. They see 'no cookies' everywhere now. The world is filled with empty sets.