By Michael Hartley
Dr Mike's Math Games for Kids has over 90 free math games and worksheets to help parents and teachers help kids enjoy math. These range from plain vanilla worksheets to online arcade-style games - from kindy counting games to really tough open-ended puzzles. There are games related to arithmetic, geometry, fractions, powers, as well as puzzles that help general thinking skills. There are even some that hide advanced math topics such as number theory just below the surface of a simple game!
With so many games to choose form, it can be hard to find the one you want. I've tried to sort them into various lists - you can access some of these from the menus at the right - but there'll always be one or two that slip through the cracks. That's why I've made this 'sitemap' page, listing every single game on the site! Scroll down, explore and enjoy!
Not Math, But Awesome: My local museum had an exhibition recently, called Dinosaur Discovery - Lost Secrets of the Cretaceous. As part of the exhibition, they had prepared a special smartphone app (available for Android or iOS). You'd load the app, point your phone at some special barcodes, and you'd suddenly see a three-dimensional dinosaur pop out! On my own Dinosaur Discovery page you can read more about the exhibition, and also find links to download your own dinosaur barcodes, and the app you'll need to use them. I also made a short Dinosaur Discovery Video that you might like to see! Good for grades 1 to 7Alice Oglesby's Cross-Number Puzzle is actually a crossword puzzle - but the clues are all arithmetic sums. How is that possible? Once you've worked out each sum on a calculator, you turn your calculator upside down, and each number becomes a letter. You can download and print Alice's puzzle, solve it, and then make your own upside-down calculator cross-number puzzle with the help of the long lists of calculator words linked from the puzzle page. Good for grades 5 to 7These Common Denominator Worksheets provide plenty of opportunity to practice putting fractions over a common denominator. Each worksheet prints out onto one page, and there are 50 worksheets total. Good for grades 4 to 6A Magic Hexagon Worksheet is just like a magic square worksheet - students need the same set of skills to solve each one - the difference is that most students will never have seen a magic hexagon before. This website has a Magic Hexagon Worksheet Generator that lets you generate randomized magic hexagon worksheets with the answer key. The worksheet will be different each time you come back to this site, so you know there's no way for students to drop by themselves and cheat by downloading their own answer key. Good for grades 4 to 6Sugar Sugar is a cool geometry game. Sugar pours out from a place near the top of the screen, and your goal is to make the sugar fall into the correct cups. You do this by drawing on the screen with the mouse, and watching as sprinkles of sugar trickle down the lines you draw. Challenging and fun! Good for grades 3 to 12On this site, I provide graph paper to download and print for the archimedean tilings (tesselations). There are eight different ways to fill a plane with a symmetrical pattern of regular polygons, some different, but all corners identical. This page explains what they all are, and provides links to pdfs you can print out and color in any pattern you like. You can download these beautiful tesselations in a variety of sizes, from 1/24 inches or 1mm to 1 inch or 1cm. Let me know how you plan to use them! Good for grades 3 to 12Design and make your own Paper Polyhedra right in your web browser with this java applet. You can design beautiful symmetric shapes with an interactiove 3D view, then print out a plan to help you make a model of the shape out of cardboard or paper. Finally, you can share your net with your friends by email, facebook, or whatever, so they, too, can enjoy your masterpiece. Good for grades 5 to 14Do you like Logic Puzzles? On this page, you can get a never-ending feast of brain-busting logic puzzles to train your logical thinking skills. In each puzzle, the police have rounded up some suspects in a crime. The evidence has given you some clues of the form If A is guilty, then B is innocent and so forth. There's only one conclusion - but what is it? Who goes free, and who will be detained? Only your logical brain can solve the mystery! Hop over to the Simple Logic Puzzle Generator and start cracking cases! Or cut and paste the puzzles to share them, with your friends! Good for grades 5 to 12Another worksheet for practicing counting and reading numbers. This time, the child must match the printed number against the box with the correct number of circles. Try it! Good for grades kindyThis page has a whole bunch of different graph paper, including this square graph paper in different sizes. Download and print as many as you want, and use them for all the things you use graph paper for - practicing spacing math problems carefully, drawing plans and maps, flowcharts, making crossword puzzles - even for drawing graphs! Good for grades 3 to 12The Goal of the OgleBoro mazes is to get from home to school - and back - obeying all the traffic signs along the way. The "no right turns" and "one way blocks" will have your pencil - and your brain - tying itself in knots! These puzzles are an awesome challenge for upper elementary kids. Download and print the mazes, and try them in your class today. Good for grades 4 to 7"What is it?" It's a Tizit!! A Tizit is an impossible figure, an optical illusion. On this site, I've uploaded 30 Tizit puzzles designed by retired math teacher Mac Oglesby. Download a Tizit, and you'll see a scattering of labeled dots, and instructions showing which ones to join. Join the dots carefully with a ruler, and an amazing, eye-twisting figure will appear. Get your kids to draw and color a Tizit now, then send me a copy of their mathematical artwork, so I can make a gallery of Tizits on this website! Good for grades 3 to 7Can you Guess My Number? I've thought of a number. You have to guess it. I'll tell you if your guess is too big or two small. Sounds easy? What if I tell you that, in the medium, hard and insane versions of this game, my answers are sometimes wrong? That I might say your guess is too small, when it's actually too big? Or that it's too big, when it's actually 100% correct? You'll be amazed at how challenging the Number Guessing Game becomes with just a little bit of uncertainty about my answers! Good for grades 4 to 11With the Space Birthday Calculator you can find out how many Jupiter years old you are or when your next Venus birthday is. Enter your birthday (and your friends' birthdays), and see how close you are to turning 21 in Mars years. Birthday information is stored on your local computer (as a 'cookie') so you don't need to enter the information over and over again each time you visit. The Space Birthday page also shows upcoming birthdays for a collection of famous scientists and celebrities. Why not organize a big space birthday party? Good for grades 3 to 12Which is the "real" circle constant, pi or tau? Perhaps you'd like to Find your name in the base 27 digits of tau? A long long time ago I made a search engine for finding your name in pi. However, since then, there's been a movement claiming that math would be better if we used 2 times pi, or tau, instead. Whichever side of that debate you fall on, you can search for your name in tau and see how soon it appears! Good for grades 4 to 12The Printable Space Birthday Worksheets lets you calculate how many years old you'd be if you were born on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn or Uranus. This site also has an Online Space Birthday Calculator, but the printable worksheets may be more useful in a classroom context. Good for grades 5 to 7The Grid Of Sums is a puzzle game by the French newspaper "Le Monde." (They called it La Grille De Sommes.) You start with an empty grid, then you fill the cells one by one. Each cell gets filled with the sum of its neighbors. On my Le Monde 'Grid Of Sums' puzzle page you can read the rules in more detail, find a link to Le Monde's original video, download printable puzzle grids of many different shapes and sizes, and get ideas for variations on the original puzzle - including how to make it a two-player game! Good for grades 3 to 12The Nine Tile Puzzle is a simple enough puzzle - download and print the puzzle tiles, then try to arrange them so that the symbols on the edges match. Sound simple? Try it then! There are almost 24 billion different ways to arrange the tiles, and only one solves the puzzle. Good for grades 3 to 7Arith Attack is a game to train up your mental arithmetic skills. Arithmetic problems descend from the top of the screen, as you solve them you score points. The longer you play, the harder the problems get and the more points they're worth. There are seven sub-games; each individual operation can be practiced separately, or you can practice addition and subtraction together, or multiplication and division together, or all four operations at once. Have fun! Good for grades 3 to 12In Roman Attack, you defend the world against an onslaught of numbers! The game helps you practise converting numbers between Roman form and the more usual "Arabic" form. The game has three subgames - converting Roman to Arabic, or Arabic to Roman, or a mixed attack of both conversions. The game tracks your high scores, so you can challenge yourself to improve every day. Try it now! Good for grades 5 to 7The Tangram Puzzle is a simple jigsaw puzzle that originated in China over 1000 years ago. Despite its apparent simplicity, there are a huge number of patterns the pieces can be arranged into. This site has a Printable Tangram Puzzle for you to download and cut out. Good for grades kindy to 4The Stomachion, or Ostomachion (literally Bone Fight) is a puzzle like the Tangram, but invented by the ancient Greeks. It has twice as many pieces, so there's many many more patterns it can be arranged into. Download and print yourself a set, and start by seeing how many ways you can form the pieces into a square! Good for grades 4 to 7The challenge of the Eight Queens Puzzle is to place eight queens on a chessboard, so that none of the queens are attacking any of the others. On my eight queens puzzle page, there's an online version of this game you can play on your computer of phone, right in your web browser. The game starts with a 4 by 4 board, and you can work up to harder and harder boards - or jump straight to the 8 by 8 board if you dare! Have a go now! Good for grades 4 to 12In the Android Version of the 8 Queens Puzzle you start by trying to put four queens on a 4 by 4 chess board. Once you've solved this, you can unlock the 5 by 5 board and try to solve that too. Keep placing the maximum number of queens on each chessboard to unlock higher and higher levels! Grab your Android device and scan the QR code on this page to get the app. Good for grades 4 to 12The Knight's Tour is a classic chess puzzle. You start by tapping or clicking the board to place a knight. Then you must move the knight around, visiting as many squares as possible, exactly once each. The squares on the board change color to show you where you've been, where you are, and where you can go next. There's also an Android version available; Drop by my Knight's Tour page and scroll down to find the play store links and QR code. Good for grades 4 to 12The 249 Sided Polygon Puzzle is not a single puzzle, but a whole bunch of pen-and-paper challenges packed into a single download. It was created by Mac Oglesby, a retired math teacher, who kindly sent it to me to make available to you. Grab a pen, and Download and print the puzzle sheet and see how many of the challenges you can crack. Good for grades 3 to 6This is a printable puzzle based on Latin Squares. The goal is to arrange the colored shapes on the grid, following certain rules. For example, each row should have one of each shape, and one of each color. Likewise, each column. Click through to the puzzle page to get a full list of the rules, links to downloadable, printable puzzle boards, and ideas for how to play this game with an ordinary pack of playing cards! Good for grades 2 to 7You've met a group of people. Some always lie, some always tell the truth. Can you figure out who does what from the statements they make? This pages can provide you with an unlimited number of logic puzzles for your use and entertainment. Start with some easy ones, and when you've become more confident, ramp up the difficulty level. For each puzzle, the computer is able to check your answers. So, grab some logic puzzles now and start exercising your logical mind! Good for grades 7 to 12Want to play Battleships with more than one player? You can! On this page, I've suggested how you can change the normal rules for the classic game Battleships, so a whole bunch of people can join in the fun. My Multiplayer Battleships page includes printable game grids so you can keep track of all your opponents, and a couple of suggestions for the rules, depending on what style of game your group likes. Good for grades 4 to 12In the Find The Cat Puzzle, a cat is hidden behind one of seven doors. You can open one door at a time, in order to try to find the cat. Unfortunately, every time you open a door, the cat moves - one step to the left or right. In what order should you open the doors, to guarantee you'll eventually catch the cat? My Find The Cat Puzzle Page hosts an interactive version of this puzzle you can play online, showing, at every step, your chances of having caught the cat so far. Good for grades 5 to 12Hex Flood is a simple game you can play right in your web browser! The goal is to fill the entire grid with a single color. There are 1893 different puzzles for you to try, with fifteen different grid shapes. The web page will (using cookies) keep track of your best score for each and every puzzle, so you can challenge yourself to improve. What are you waiting for? Click or tap through to Hex Flood now, and test your puzzle cracking skills! Good for grades 3 to 12Dice of Destiny is two games in one! There's a simple game (Dice War) for kindy or pre-K kids to learn counting, and the much more complicated battle game that it morphed into when I was play-testing Dice War with my (pre-teen, not pre-K) son. All you need is some dice and (for the complex game for older kids) a pack of ordinary playing cards. Read the rules of Dice of Destiny here, and have a quick game now! Good for grades kindy to 7Dr Mike's Times Tables Game is professionally printed version of the times tables board game elsewhere on this site. Instead of spending heaps of time cutting and pasting, you can just order this game online, and in no time have your kids moving their playing pieces around the double-printed board, quizzing each other on times tables with the colorful question cards. You actually get 3 games in 1, because the instruction manual explains two other games you can play with the same boxed set! Good for grades 3 to 7The Daily Hex Flood Puzzle gives you a new strategy puzzle every day for you to warm up those brain cells. Transform the grid of hexagons so that the whole grid is a single color. Challenge yourself to beat your best score (he game keeps track of all your stats), and challenge your friends to see how well they do! You can read more here, or here's a direct link to the game! Good for grades kindy to 12Hex Hopper offers a challenging solitaire puzzle that will stretch your strategic thinking. Inspired by the classic puzzle Conway's Soldiers, you aim to move pieces across a hexagonal grid, hopping over adjacent pieces to reach as far as possible! Each move requires careful planning, as you can only jump over pieces into empty spaces beyond, with the goal of advancing higher on the grid. Challenge yourself to reach new heights and see how far you can go! You can read more here, or here's a direct link to the game. See how you go, and share your score to challenge your friends!
Good for grades kindy to 12There is a famous story about the inventor of chess, who was offered a reward by the emperor of India. He chose a reward that seemed to the emperor very cheap - just a few sacks of rice - but in reality came to more rice than India could produce in a million years. This site has worksheets to help kids work through a Modern Rice-And-Chessboard Story and see for themselves how rich the reward was. Good for grades 6 to 12Kindy Bingo has some printable 3x3 bingo cards, suitable for kids who know the numbers 1 through 10. Each set of three numbers appears at most once in the set of cards. If you don't want to have a winner after only three numbers are called out, the web page explains which three numbers can be your first three. Good for grades kindy and 1Do you have a group of kindy kids struggling to remember addition sums up to 10? Try this math board game on them. You'll need to do some printing and cutting first, and find a die (dice) and some playing pieces. Good for grades kindy to 2Use this Printable Sudoku Generator to create as many printable sudoku puzzles as you like, or download the ones I've already generated for you. You can choose the difficulty level, the number of puzzles to print, and whether or not to print the solutions. Good for grades 4 to 12Times Tables Memory is a memory game that will help transfer times table facts from short-term to long-term memory. It can be played solo, or with a friend. Good for grades 3These Sight Number exercises, inspired by "Salisbury Sight Words", are designed to help your kids memorise their addition, subtraction and multiplication tables in the optimal way. Good for grades 1 to 3This Addition Trick seemed like magic when my uncle first showed it to me. I was 11 years old, I think. Here I explain the trick so you can amaze the 11-year-olds in your life. Good for grades 5 and 6Looking for a Times Table Board Game? Print out the playing board and the question cards, and start rolling the dice! Good for small or medium groups of kids, from grades 2 to 4. Good for grades 3The Traffic Jam Game is one of my favorite amongst the elementary math games on this site. It's a great puzzle for teaching logical thinking and boosting problem-solving ability. Yet, the rules are simple enough that a four-year old can understand them. First, second and third grade kids will enjoy the simpler puzzles. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders will enjoy the challenge of the harder ones. Try the printable version or the online version. Good for grades 1 to 12In the Magical Calculator Birthday Trick and the "Threes" Math Trick, one child gives a sequence of arithmetic instructions to another, then performs a few simple mental steps on the result. Almost like magic, the other's birthday (or another secret number) appears as the result of the sum! Good for fourth grade kids and up. Good for grades 5 to 12Why not Find Your Name In Pi? When we write pi=3.14159.., we use our normal ten different digits, which we call 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. I converted pi to base 27, and called the digits <space>, A, B, C, ..., Z. That way, the digits of pi become a long list of letters. I've got 31 million base 27 digits, I've put them on my webserver, and I've made a search box for you to use! How soon does your name appear? Good for grades 7 to 12This free "fours" contest closed on the 20th of October, 2009. The idea was to make as many numbers as possible using the digit '4' (as many times as you like) and the operations plus, minus, divide and times. Soon I'll upload the contest results, and ideas for how you can run a contest like this one in your own classroom. Good for grades 4 to 7Print out as many foldable number sheets as you want, and use them to explain our "number system" - why the 8's in eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight all mean different things, even though they look exactly the same! There are three sizes of printable sheets, and also a movie showing one time I used them with my son to explain a point that was troubling him. Good for grades 1This page has a link to a file you can print onto cardboard and cut out, to make a great toy for learning number and arithmetic. It's a set of blocks - or at least, the closest I could get to a set of blocks printed on cardboard. The page also suggests a number of games you can teach a child to help them get the most out of the game. You'll need a color printer. Good for grades kindyDoes someone need Practice Multiplying Or Dividing By Ten, Hundred or a Thousand? This worksheet generator lets you create as many practice questions as you like for manipulating powers of 10. Create easy or difficult worksheets, long or short ones, or even create individual worksheets for each member of your classroom to prevent copying... Good for grades 3 and 4I've made a dozen or so Hexagonal Graph Paper downloads. You can print out as many of these as you want, in various sizes, then use them as you wish. Perhaps color them with a pattern like the one shown, or make a game board for your favorite hex grid board game... let your imagination run wild! Good for grades 2 to 12This is the Online Traffic Jam Game. Traffic Jam Game is the famous game where you have to move the red car out of the traffic jammed parking lot. This free online version has hundreds of puzzles, as well as links to PC, Mac and Android versions you can buy. Good for grades kindy to 12Follow this link to get the Fraction Division Worksheets provided on this website. Like the other fractions worksheets on this site, the fraction division worksheets are grouped into five different difficulty levels, with 10 worksheets in each level. Each worksheet has 10 questions. This is more than enough practice to make anyone a fraction division expert. Good for grades 5 to 7Math is not just about number. On this page I've provided a printable version of a toy my mom gave me as a child. It's a collection of tiles of different shapes, sizes and colors. The page also gives suggestions for how you might use them to benefit your kid or kids. You'll need a color printer. Good for grades kindyThese Math Mazes are good for puzzle-loving kids as they learn their 7 and 8 times tables. They may look like ordinary mazes, but knowing your times table will help you reach your goal! Good for grades 3Not exactly a game, but certainly a useful tool for teaching kids addition and subtraction facts - either actively through memory exercises, or passively through osmosis! These addition and subtraction tables and charts are free, and ready for you to print and use. Good for grades kindy and 1An Advent Calendar, besides being a great Christmas tradition, helps teach younger kids counting and calendars in a fun, exciting way. Download and print this free advent calendar, make up up with a trimmer and glue, and enjoy the Christmas countdown with your child. Good for grades kindy to 3The Adding Fractions Worksheets Page has links to dozens and dozens of practice questions for fraction addition. Each worksheet prints onto a single page Good for grades 5 to 7In This Challenging Math Puzzle you have to place the numbers one through eight in a grid, such that no two neighboring squares have consecutive numbers. It's possible to solve, but it can be quite tough. I've seen 4th graders baffle away for weeks at this puzzle, but its 5th grade and 6th grade kids who seem to have a more realistic chance to solve it. Enjoy! Good for grades 4 to 12In the Math Architect Online Game the goal is to design an apartment with the given area. The catch? Each room is a square, and you must have as few rooms as possible! This makes the game challenging enough to keep kids occupied, and deep enough to keep them learning as they play. There is also a high scores table showing the best players each month, year and for all time, and some ideas for playing math architect as a paper and pencil game. Good for grades 4 to 12This is one of two math tricks on this site that let you guess someone's birthday after a sequence of mathematical operations. Good for grades 5 to 12Print these Magic Number Cards, learn how to use them, and with a bit of practice you'll be able to amaze your friends with your number guessing skills! This page provides the traditional version of this trick, as well as a few variations of my own invention. Full instructions and a video example are available at the web page. Good for grades 3 to 5Need worksheets to practice Telling the Time? Follow the link here and you'll find a clock reading worksheet generator. Each worksheet has solutions provided, and is individually created for you and not saved on the server. You can choose what time reading skill you want the kids to practice, including reading digital or analog time, or analog clock faces. You can create a worksheets with times like 8:52 or 12:03, or just o'clocks, or anything in between. Grab some worksheets now! Good for grades 1 to 3Fizz Buzz is a well-known game. It gives practice identifying multiples of 5 and 7. It's a great math game for kids, and a hilarious ice-breaker for adults too! At the web page you'll find a "fizz-buzziness calculator" that will determine what a player should say for any given number. Good for grades 4 to 12The Upside-Down Calculator Word Game is recommended for kids in fifth grade and fourth grade, and maybe also third grade. Younger children may find it too challenging - although my son's grade one teacher recently gave an exercise like this one to her class! The aim is to find numbers that make words when keyed into an upside-down calculator. See the game's page for more details. Good for grades 4Flashcard Stepping Stones is a simple game, quick to set up, and helps make flashcards more enjoyable. Be as theatrical as possible, and create an imaginary playful world for your child, as he or she recalls the math facts they need to rescue the princess, or destroy the evil robot, or arrive at adventureland! Good for grades 1 to 3The UPS Game has a worksheet kids can customize with their friends' names. Once they've done that, the goal is to find a route that loops from the UPS office to each of their friends' houses in turn, before finally returning to the starting point. That's not too hard in itself - the challenge is to make the route as short as possible! Once the kids have finished that, this game comes with a bonus challenge - find a site for the grocery store that minimizes the total distance to each of the houses. That makes UPS Game two games in one! Good for grades 5 and 6To solve the 2 to 9 Makes 16 Puzzle, you need to arrange the numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 into the grid shown, so that each outer row and column adds up to sixteen. On the puzzle page I've provided a printable downloadable puzzle sheet so you can try the puzzle out on your class, friends, family or colleagues. Grab it now, and get puzzled! Good for grades 4 to 12Dots and Boxes is a classic two-player pen-and-paper game. Start with a grid of dots, and take turns to join dots. If you complete a square, you get an extra turn. The player with the most squares at the end is the winner! My Dots and Boxes page has some game sheets to download and print, some strategy tips, and some suggested variations on the traditional version. Care for a three-player game of Dots And Hexagons, for example? Good for grades 3 to 12These timetable worksheets will give your child practice reading timetables, schedules, itineraries and the like. Good for grades 2 and 3Wishing that there were educational arcade games? Well, Mathteroids, the math asteroid game is the next best thing! This is an action-packed asteroid shooter game where you must sharpen your math skills to know which asteroids to shoot! Good for grades four and up. Good for grades 5 to 7Try the Fractions Card Game if you have children who need to practice adding and subtracting fractions. There's a set of playing cards to print and cut out, and suggestions for at least three games you can play with them. In one, the aim is to find groups of cards that add up to one, so kids will pick up skills in addition and subtraction of fractions, as well as reducing fractions, as they pit their wits against one another. Good for grades 4 to 6The Easter Date Worksheets allow a child to compute the date of Easter Sunday in any year at all, with no math more complex than long division. Alternatively, try younger kids on the simpler versions of the worksheets - fewer calculations, smaller numbers, but they only work in certain centuries. Good for grades 4 to 12MathGolf is a simple game to play, and a very hard game to master. The high scores for each month are recorded on the website. The tips for parents and teachers explains how to help your kids get the most out of the game. Good for grades 3 to 6To win this big numbers contest, your kids just need to think of the biggest number they possibly can - bigger than anyone else's! This contest closed on October 20, 2008, but the page shows you how you can organize a min-contest within a class or a school. Good for grades 6 to 12This website has a host of times table charts and grids that you can download and print - even up to the 20 times tables! Good for grades 3Sometimes a bit of practice helps. The worksheets on this page give a child practice both counting and recognizing printed numbers. The kid is supposed to read a printed number, then draw the correct number of objects in the space provided. Good for grades kindyIf your kids like more action, and they are at the same level with their times tables, try Times Tables Snap! Good for grades 3These Simplifying Fractions Worksheets have hundreds of simplifying fractions questions to try. There are a variety of levels of difficulty to choose from. This should be all the worksheets you'll ever need! Good for grades 4 to 6Looking for Fraction Multiplication Worksheets? This page has hundreds of fraction multiplication practice questions sorted into worksheets fo 10 questions each. More than enough practice questions for almost any math student to learn fractio multiplication. Good for grades 5 to 7One of my former math lecturers made a set of Sudoku Puzzles for Kids. Each printable puzzle has clues, showing which squares are the easiest to fill in first. It provides a good guide for helping kids get started solving sudoku puzzles. Good for grades 2Try the Magic Square Puzzle Worksheets on this site. Almost 40 magic square puzzles to try, as well as ideas for how to use it in a classroom. Good for grade 3 and up. Good for grades 4 to 6In one famous puzzle, you must make as many numbers as you can using only the given four digits and the basic arithmetic operations. I've worked out which sets of four digits make this puzzle the most interesting, and provided worksheets on this page. Good for grades four and up. Good for grades 5 to 12The Arithmetic Math Game is a game where players roll special dice and do arithmetic based on the results, hoping to reach a specific number goal. It is most suitable for grades four or five, but you can modify the rules to make it easier or harder. Good for grades 5 and 6To solve these Number Mazes you need to find a path across a grid of numbers, stepping only vertically or horizontally each step. The tricky part is that you have to make sure the total of the numbers you pass is correct! You can download a set of easy 3x3 mazes, or harder 4x3 mazes, or really tough 5x3 or 4x4 mazes. Each time you visit the page you'll get new sets of mazes, uniquely generated for you. You might find a calculator handy to check the totals as you try and try and try again! Good for grades 4 to 12"I shall now discern how many cards you have!!!" My dad taught me this Magic Card Counting Trick when I was a kid. It's simple, easy to perform, and always amazes even smart kids. On the web page I explain how to do the trick, including the math behind it. I've also included a video so you can see the trick in action. Pop over now, watch the video, read the tips, then start planning your next mathemagic show! Good for grades 4 to 12One of these addition and subtraction worksheets is especially designed as a learning tool, not just a revision exercise. The sums are ordered so that the child working through them will discover for themselves the relationship between addition and subtraction, and other important points. There are some plain vanilla revision worksheets too! Good for grades kindy and 1Print out and make this set of Fractions Dominoes. It's a fractions activity designed to help kids recognise how much of a circle each fraction represents. Unlike some other math games, winning is not just about being better at math - but the game nonetheless provides great learning opportunities. Good for grades 2 and 3 Get into Groups Of... five minus two! This game is a great game for younger children - because it involves lots of running around! Good for kindy kids, also for 1st and 2nd graders. The page shows how to vary the rules to make it interesting for older children too. Good for grades kindy to 2Traveling with kids aged 10 to 99? Take along this Math Card Game and keep them up to speed on their arithmetic! Good for grade 4 and up. Good for grades 5 to 7Get Interval Of Time Worksheets here - as many as you need, all different if you like. This worksheet generator allows you to create randomized worksheets, but still bookmark a particular worksheet (and its solutions) so that you can come back to it later. The worksheets cover adding or subtracting an amount of time to a particular time of day, or finding the time interval between two times of day. Good for grades 2 to 5The April Fool's Date Calculator worksheet lets kids calculate the date of April Fools Day for any year. It works like the Easter Date Worksheet - write the year in a box in the worksheet, copy numbers along arrows, and the date of April Fools appears at the end! Ok, in all seriousness - the real educational value in this worksheet - besides arithmetic practice - is to make kids wonder how on earth the worksheet manages to get the right date for April Fool's Day every time. Good for grades 4 to 12This page has a set of Triangular Graph Paper sheets for you to download and print. The sizes of the triangles range from 1mm to 1 inch, so you'll be able to find one that suits your project. The tessellations are of equilateral triangles - the most symmetric tessellation of triangles there is. Download and print as many as you want! Good for grades 2 to 12The 1 to 9 game is a game where players have to collect three numbers that add up to 15. It will help teach arithmetic to younger kids. For older kids, it will help them with strategic and logical thinking. The game's page shows how to vary the rules to make it suitable for any elementary school grade. Good for grades 2 to 6This Checkerboard (or Chessboard) Jigsaw Puzzle will be a great challenge for your primary school kids. Watch them try and try to arrange the pieces until they succeed! Good for grades 4 to 7Mathino is a game that can be played with an ordinary pack of cards. It's based on a common card game, Cassino, that already is good for kids learning arithmetic. Good for grades 1 to 3, maybe even 4! Good for grades 1 to 3This Math Board Game will ensure kids get a lot of mental arithmetic practice! Good for grade 4 and up. This site also has a Times Table Board Game... see below! Good for grades 5 and 6Try Fish Plus One for kids who need to practice their basic addition skills. This game can be played with a normal pack of cards, once the picture cards have been removed. Once your kids get good at Fish Plus One, move them on to Fish Plus Two, Fish Plus Three, and finally Fish Plus Plus! Good for grades kindy and 1This Set Of Tiles can be used to help teach kids how to add and subtract numbers of more than one digit. Good for, say, first to third graders, or anyone who just doesn't 'get' the idea of carrying and borrowing 1's. Good for grades 2This Kindy Subtraction Game goes hand in hand with the Kindy Addition Game elsewhere on this site. It lets you teach kids the idea of subtraction using something dear to their heart - yummy snacks! Good for grades kindyOr play a game of Math Hangman? "Three strikes and you're out" is the rule as kids try to guess the hidden math word or sum! Good for almost any grade level! Good for grades 2 to 7In a Cryptarithm puzzle, each digit of an arithmetic sum has been replaced with a letter of the alphabet. The aim of the puzzle is to restore the original sum. These puzzles are sometimes called alphametics or crypt-arithmetics. You can get many more such puzzles from the resources available at www.cryptarithmania.com. Good for grades 5 to 12To complement the online version, I've prepared a Printable Version of Color Switcher. Color Switcher is a puzzle game - you start with some beads on a board, and the goal is to change the colors of all the beads using a series of jumps. This web page has ideas for how you can prepare your own color switcher puzzle set, and has links to printable puzzle booklets with dozens of puzzles to try to solve. Good for grades 3 to 7In this puzzle, the goal is to cut a Heart-Shaped Biscuit into three pieces, so that each piece contains only one color of
sprinkles. The cuts will be very twisty and wiggly, but that's fine for this puzzle. Because of the shape of the biscuit, this puzzle is perfect for around Valentine's Day, but it can also be used at any other time of the year. Good for grades 3 to 6Here's a large collection of Equivalent Fractions Worksheets to give math students practice checking whether fractions are equivalent or not. Good for grades 4 to 6Here's a fun game that is almost guaranteed to make your kids love math, particularly addition. They'll love it for one simple reason - food! To play the game, you only need a printout of the colorful picture provided (there's also a black-and-white version), and a supply of small yummy snacks. Sultanas worked best for my son. Full instructions, and tips on how to avoid behavior pitfalls, are provided. Good for grades kindyThis Angle Geometry Quiz tests your knowledge of a few facts relating to angles. Race against the clock as you prove your skills! Topics covered include the interior angles of triangles and quadrilaterals, angles near parallel lines, lines meeting at a point and others. Good for grades 7 to 11Try your 2nd graders to 7th graders on the Pizza Cutting Puzzle! This puzzle can be made as easy or as hard as you like, so you can tune it for any age group. Good for grades 3 to 12Do perform this Magic Number Spelling Card Trick, you need to get the special set of cards provided. Then, the trick is simple - a card is selected, the number on the card is spelled out and the cards are sorted into their two different colors. Then, work out the total of the numbers in each pile. The difference between the two piles is the number first drawn! The web page for the trick contains links to downloadable sets of cards, or places you can buy a full color set, and a link to a video demonstrating the trick. Try it out! Good for grades 4 to 9This Power Puzzle is an exercise to get kids exploring numbers with their calculator, and observe patterns in the numbers they explore. Good for grades 5 to 12The Dot Joining Game is not a join-the-dots puzzle, but a two-player paper-and-pencil game. I've described the game, and also described how you can help your fourth, fifth and sixth graders to unlock the hidden mathematical patterns behind the game. Good for grades 6 and 7This Fraction Simplifying Puzzle challenges kids to simplify a collection of fractions and observe which ones can and can not be simplified. There are variants of the puzzle that make it suitable for kids just learning fractions, all the way up to lower high school. Good for grades 4 to 12The Volume Measuring Puzzle is a classic puzzle. The goal is to measure out the a certain volume of water. You have two cups you can use, unfortunately, neither cup is the correct size for the job! So you need to pour water from one cup to the other, and back to the water source repeatedly until finally one of the cups contains the correct amount. This web page contains two playable versions (one with two cups, one with three) and some tips for offline play. Good for grades 4 to 8Like the other fractions worksheets pages on this site, the Subtraction Fractions Worksheets page has links to all the fraction subtraction worksheets you'll need. Bookmark it and come back when you need more. Good for grades 5 to 7Congrats, you've reached the end of a long long list! I hope you found some games you think will be useful! Do check back often, or better still, sign up to be notified when new games appear! See you soon!
Yours, Dr Mike....