Math Girl Games- The Fun Keeps Adding Up!

Math Girl Games, created by Lynn and Molly Rasmussen, recently launched Addition House adding to their popular series aimed directly at young girls.  Addition House builds on the skills explored in Number Garden allowing girls to gain confidence in math.  The beauty of this app is that it syncs with Number Garden allowing you to view both your house and your garden. 

Continuing with the right-brain approach to learning, Addition House possesses all the things you love about Number Garden.  Through game play, girls count patterns of flowers to develop visual representations of basic addition skills.  Through this method of pattern recognition, they are able to quickly move away from counting individual items to counting groups of items laying a foundation for multiplication concepts.

If that's not enough, there are opportunities for the more advanced to challenge themselves in timed play and develop fluency of their basic facts.  With each success, the player is awarded virtual "money" in which they can go shopping and decorate their house.  What girl wouldn't love that!  The shopping experience actually serves as a surprise bonus.  As the child buys and sells items for their house, they develop money skills as well. 

As with all of the apps I review, they are field tested on our children, the gymnastics team, the soccer kids and the kids I tutor.  The overwhelming response was "This is fun! I wish I could do this for math homework."  Our second grader was quoted as saying it was "addicting."  Imagine that, being addicted to learning math!  That is every educators dream!  The team at Math Girl has found a winning combination by creating a platform where young girls can develop math skills using a visually interesting and engaging game. 

Check out this series for an exciting alternative to flash cards and the traditional "drill-n-kill" approach to learning.  This is an inexpensive way for young girls to gain confidence, develop fluency and see that math is fun!

Comments

[Sarah]

I use a lot of board games with my children to develop fact fluency as I think this is an essential math skill. A free resource that I discovered recently is:

http://www.k-5mathteachingresources.com/index.html

It offers a lot of printable games and activities to develop number skills and other areas such as geometry and measurement.

[Ashley Allain]

Thanks for sharing! I'll check it out. Board games are a favorite around here too. Have a wonderful week!