I’m going to be honest with you. I have one son who is great at math, it comes easy. Yet he hates math curriculum. “It’s so boring”, he complains as he jumps ahead lesson after lesson making A’s. My other son hates math. He struggles. It’s a chore. He hates all math curriculum. I’m happy if he can eek out a C. Which I know sounds like homeschool taboo, but let’s be real – not every homeschool kid is gifted.
One day tired of listening to all their math complaining I pulled out Yahtzee and we played. We played 3 games without complaint. I made them count their own rolls and scores. Adding everything up themselves. They loved it. They loved me. The world was right again.
Of course that afternoon I was wondering how on earth I was going to “show” we did Math for our homeschool end-of-the-year evaluation. Bring all the Yahtzee score cards? Then I realized if I had a printable worksheet we could just 3-hole punch it and officially count throwing dice as Math.
Some days you just have to get out of the box curriculum, grab the dice, and have fun. Print our Math Skills Game worksheet. You will need your own dice to play. (notice I wrote “game” at the top – so everyone can relax a bit and have fun)
Be sure to let your children count their dice themselves. This was so incredibly hard for me – I just wanted to shout out the number because watching them count 12 dots twice drove me CRAZY ! “All the dots automatically is 12, every time, you don’t have to count. Trust me, okay?”
Looking back, I should have sat back and enjoyed a cup of coffee rather than helicopter parent.
We have 2 pages for this Math Dice Game download. Addition and Subtraction!! Tip: Write the bigger number on the left unless you’re ready to start talking about negative numbers.