Fact Family Math Card Game

One of my favorite math tools to keep in my classroom is playing cards!  I blog often about how I use them to play Math Games that build Base 10 and comparing and other math skills.  But today, let's chat about how to use playing cards to learn about related facts or fact families!

This game (like so many math card games!) can be played alone or in partners.  I love that my kids can choose if they want to work alone or with someone and still play the same game!

For this game, you only need cards 1-9 in the deck.  Put all of the other cards to the side. (If you play my other games that use a "0"--Queen-- or 10, you can keep those in this deck, but the game may be just a little harder that way.  It is totally doable if you want though!)

You will deal 21 cards in a face down stack.  Then, turn over 4 cards in a row beside the deck like this...

Look through the 4 cards and see if you can find 3 cards that make an addition or subtraction fact.  If you find a fact, pull the cards down and fill in the other related facts on your fact family game sheet.

Then, fill in with 3 more cards from the deck to get back to having 4 cards showing.  If you cannot find a fact family, simply draw another card from the deck to lay out until you can find a fact family.

The only difference with this is you may not need to draw any more cards or may need to draw fewer cards.  You want to keep 4 cards showing at the start of each round.

The object of the game is to find as many fact families as possible.  If you want to play against a partner you can take turns and see who can find the most fact families!

You can find plans for this game and the recording sheet in this Guided Math Workshop Plans Resource.