Homeschooling with a Deck of Cards

Do fierce battles raging in your home sound educational? Our home has become a war zone with a simple deck of cards...and the children are actually learning!

A friend told me about using a deck of cards to reinforce math concepts. You remember playing the card game War when you were young, don't you?...Where you evenly deal out all the cards, face down, and each player lays down one card from their pile at a time and whoever has the biggest number, or card of most value wins. Play continues till one person has all the cards. Is this jogging your memory?

That game in its original form is great for reinforcing the value of numbers: which number is larger and smaller. (You may want to remove the face cards from the deck, but we typically uses Aces as 1 and Jokers as 0.) But, taking this a step further, instead of winning a match with the highest number, you can use the battles to reinforce math facts! When each player turns over a card, the cards can be either added, subtracted, multiplied or divided (decide before starting the game which you'd like to do), and the first one to shout out the correct answer wins! This has definately helped my oldest get that much needed practice without her even realizing she is doing so! I'd say that's putting a bit of sugar with your medicine, eh?!

The idea of homeschooling with a deck of cards is time saving, inexpensive, has multiple uses, has virtually no preparation time, and is FUN for both parents and children! I'd say that fits well into Domestic Legacy's criteria!

Can you think of some other great ideas on how to use a deck of cards to homeschool? Why don't you share them with us here! Looking forward to your comments!

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