Free Math Games: The Great Pet Races

I made this selection of games to help DD practice her basic math facts again.  She’s rusty on the problems like 8+7 and 6+9.  Since she and ED really love their little pets, I drew some little critters to appeal to them!

You can adjust any of these board games to suit your preschooler (by just identifying the numbers on the board) or your older child (by creating more complicated addition, subtraction or division problems).

Capture the Pet:

• What you need—addition cards and two types of tokens, one for each play.
• On index cards, write out addition problems that equal the numbers on the page. Examples – 6+7, 8+6, 5+10. (For a younger child, you can use the numbers themselves – 13, 14, 15, etc. For the older child you can use division problems such as 56 divided by  7 or 48 divided by  6 – see page 6 of the download pack.)
• Each player takes a turn drawing a card, figuring out the answer and placing a token on an animal.  If the other player has a token you can bump them off that spot and replace it with your own. The first player to have two tokens on a pet has captured it. The game is over when all pets on the board have been captured.
• The object of the game is to be the player to capture the most pets by placing 2 tokens on each pet.

As you can see, I adapted these gameboards for ED (identifying the numbers), DD (addition) and LD (division). Everyone clamors for games in our house!

13s, 14s and 15s Math Gameboards:

• Have a stack of cards with the numbers 1 through 12 (for the 13s gameboard) , 1 through 13 (for the 14 gameboard) or 1 through 14s (15s gameboard). Make sure you have 3 or 4 cards for each number.
• Each player takes turns drawing a card and figuring out what number would make 13 (or 14 or 15).
• So if you were playing the 14s game board (pictured below) and you drew a 8, then you would move your token to the next available 6 spot. Then the next player takes a turn. If she turned over the number 12, she would have to move to the next available 2 spot on the board.  The first player to reach the finish wins the game.

Download  The Great Pet Races here.