My nephew got this for his birthday earlier in the week and we have had such fun playing it this week.
It contains the game board, dice, coloured counters, game pieces and tally sheets.
The aim of the game is to collect the most counters before you reach the end of the board. The different coloured counters are worth different amounts.
My nephews are in first class and third class, both really enjoyed this game. We played the game as suggested and recorded our counters on the tally sheet. My younger nephew needed some help working out what the value of his cou terms were but once he got the hang of it he was flying.
The verdict:
This game was great, it has a suggested playing time of 15 mins which was an ideal time for board games with a 9 and 7 year old. It is ideal time for a game in the classroom too!
The aim was to get as many counters as you can, so it didn’t focus on reaching the end of the board first. I really liked this concept which could help children to deal with not being first.
There are so many maths concepts in this game, from subitising, one to one correspondence, adding and skip counting to using the tally sheet as you gather the couters.
There are many ways to differentiate the game too, for younger children just collecting the counters and keeping the value at 1 unit or using the dice with just numbers on them. In older classes depending on the tables you are covering you could change the values of the colours to encourage skip counting and multiplication.
Really the list goes on and on for this game. It would be great for any classroom from infants up to senior classes. While the playing time was 15mins, we sat and played lots of games for nearly an hour! This game gets a big thumbs up from my nephews too!
A.M.
Aistear Múinteoir 