New Game in Town

   Max has insisted on a break from gameplaying lately.  But this past week he's been willing to play again, and we introduced this new game.

  It's a very simple one.  At United Art & Education i bought 2 sets of dice, one with a variety of shapes & colors, the other with - i think they're called "operators."  You'll recognize the plus, etc., signs.  All one set.
  Here's how we do it:
  Max chooses any two number dice.  i set out two equal signs, and choose two other dice from that set.  We both shake what we have, and i arrange the sentence for him, then he gets to put the numbers in.  Sometimes he will tell me the answer to the resulting sentence, sometimes he will choose another die to show the answer, or sometimes we get involved in something complicated with paper & pen.

  We might end up with something like this:

 

  He finds the first one easy, but the greater than/less than ones are hard for him.

  Sometimes we get something like this:

  He does love to arrange the small numbers first!  So we do fractions and negative numbers.  i know he's done fractions before, but i think negative numbers are new. 

This was for  1 divided by 8.

Negative Numbers Scratching

  If we do this 6-8 times in a row, we've done it a lot of repetitions.  The idea is to keep it fresh & interesting.  If we get into something complicated, like the greater than/less than, or fractions, or negatives, that pretty much is the end.
  But i think the bright novelty dice make it fun.