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My homeschool style changes by the week. Sometimes by boys want to do a worksheet and other days they want to do nothing else but play outside. This is fine with me because I was a traditionally trained teacher turned lover of games and differentiation! I still find joy in searching for a worksheet and printing it off. But, I also LOVE finding ways to learn off of the paper.

My 1st grader has been working on using different strategies to add 3 basic addends (counting on, grouping, rounding up and subtracting, etc.). Yesterday we hung up a dart board outside and began playing. After my son’s first round, I witness him add 9+2+5 without batting an eye. I realized this was because we were playing a game!

Check out this giant indoor dart game!

Here is the dart board we use.

Putting my son in a location he felt totally comfortable in (the outdoors- because I am not letting him throw a dart in the house, c’mon how 🙂 allowed him to let his walls down and just play. I wasn’t asking him questions, he wasn’t trying to prove or ‘show what you know.’ He was just playing and I was observing and taking. mental notes.

We play about 10 rounds of darts and he added his scores each time. Sometimes it took awhile and I wanted to badly to ask him to use a different strategy but I didn’t. He stayed comfortable and kept adding, and I got to spend time outside playing with my kid. It was a win-win!

This game is definitely getting added to our list of math games! I may even try it with multiplication with my older son.

Do you have a go-to game you play with sharpen those math skills? I would love to hear about it!