As a homeschooling mom, my kids know that I’m often trying to sneak learning moments into our day. Unfortunately, they are now old enough to resist my attempts to shove some factoids down their throats; often they aren’t trying to be mean, it’s just their way of saying: Lighten Up Mom.
But today we played a game that had us all giggling and smiling. Oh, and doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
The game that got us to combine fun with math—something my nine year old would swear is impossible—is Young Learners’ The Clever Detective by Italian game company Clementoni.
The object of the game is to answer your questions correctly so that you can disguise your “detective” with items like little mustaches, hats, bow ties and sunglasses. The disguises are a lot like those Colorforms I used to play with so they are easy to stick on and peel off at the end of the game.
In order to win a piece of the disguise, each players takes turns trying to solve a math problem. A little “spy glass” is used to check if the answer is correct, though when the spy glass is ultimately lost in our house, I will still be able to make out the answers on the back of the cards with my naked eye. Not that I needed help answering simple double-digit equations. Ahem.
My six year old had no trouble with the addition/subtraction equations, though he did need help with the multiplication/division ones. My oldest who hates math with the fire of a thousand suns happily showed off her skills to her younger siblings in a quest to get her detective dressed up first.
And I played along, biting my tongue to keep me from shouting, You’re doing math! On a SUNDAY! It wasn’t easy. -Christina
Young Learners’ The Clever Detective game by Clementoni is available at our affiliate Amazon.
