It’s hard to get kids excited about math. At least when they’re young, math is pretty concrete. Addition, subtraction, fractions, multiplication and division can all be seen in every day life as necessities.
But once we get to negative numbers and variables, a lot of kids lose their motivation to work on something that doesn’t seem to have a lot of purpose.
You might be familiar with the game schooling movement. What is game schooling?
Game schooling is a wide definition that generally covers the practice of using games as a consistent resource in one’s educational goals.
Game schooling is getting a lot more attention lately as homeschooling is growing and parents are finding that a school-at-home model isn’t working for their kids. Plus, it’s great fun for parents as well to play educational games with their kids!
Games can be obviously educational, or a bit more subtle. Either way, research shows that kids that use games show improvement in their educational skills.
And for math specifically? Research shows that when kids play a game with a number line, like Creature Quest, show better improvement in:
- Numeral identification
- Counting
- Number line estimation (in which a child is asked to mark the location of a number on a line)
- Numerical magnitude comparison (in which a child is asked to choose the greater of two numbers)
Jane Healy in Growing Your Child’s Mind sums it up by saying:
“One predictor of a child’s success in elementary school math is how many games he and his family played together.”
Learning this, I wanted to start building our own educational game library, but holy cow, there are a LOT of games to sift through, and it’s hard to decipher which games are total fluff and which have at least a sliver of educational value.
Creature Quest
The following is a review for Creature Quest in which I have been compensated for my time. As always, all opinions are my own.
When given the opportunity to review Creature Quest, I jumped at the chance! My Kindergartener already says about math, “I’m never going to use this!”… and that was just while learning subtraction.
Creature Quest in a nutshell:
- Creature Quest teaches kids how positive and negative numbers work
- Helps build and an understanding of the number line along with your child’s spatial skills
- Comes with over 50 cards, pawns, die, board, and short instructions
But what I found really fun about it is that I didn’t have to get into a lecture about negative numbers, or explain how they’d be used in daily life (so hard to explain to someone that only has 6 years of experience in this world). It’s a game. Just play the game.
Get to 24 and you win. Get to -24 and you lose. Simple.
Number sense
The creator of Creature Quest describes her frustration with math from an early age. This was not my experience. In fact, I loved math! I’ve always been really good at finding patterns and doing math problems. Since it comes naturally to me, I recognize how integral it is for kids to have a good number sense from the very beginning.
2+2=4 means nothing on a sheet of paper.
It means something when you have objects you can touch, or see a number line right in front of you. We’ve been using Right Start Math which takes care of the aspect of having manipulatives, but so far we have not worked with a number line (the abacus in the closest thing). Between Right Start Math and Creature Quest, I feel confident in creating an atmosphere of teaching number sense in a logical and thorough way.
High quality
Honestly, I did worry that it would be a bit dry and my kids would be bored of it. My kids are known to just walk away from a game right in the middle of playing if they aren’t interested in it anymore. With the characters and the events describing why they had to move forward or back, both my preschooler and Kindergartener stayed for the whole game. Yay!
You can tell a lot of love and care went into making this game. It’s a simple design and incredibly easy to learn.
You can buy Creature Quest from the parent site, Amazing Wiz Kids, which has a nice variety of educational toys and games for all ages. Some games on the site you won’t find anywhere else, like Creature Quest!
Middle Way Mom readers also get $10 off with the code MIDDLEWAY!! Awesome!!
Want to keep up to date with Amazing Wiz Kids? You can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
My kid hates math with a passion (& so did I at his age!) I think this is just the type of thing we need because if we don’t get grade school math then how do we even begin to think about high school?
I may try out this game to see if it will help him get the negative # concept
I hope this works for you! I know with some subjects we have to get pretty creative to get kids to work through things that are a bit harder.
Games are always the preferred way of learning something. I wish they had a game for every concept in math. This is the only one I’ve seen that deals with negative #s
Cool game
It is a cool game, and I’m so happy my kids love to play it on their own, too!
This is one of the few games my kids would like that they dont have already. Kids understand the concept just from playing the game without any prior knowledge? A game I don’t have to supervise is always convenient.
I think you’d need to help a couple times to get the idea that -5 is less than 3. There are a few cards where you’re given a choice like that and it takes a little guidance to show them the difference. After that it’s not hard for them to play on their own as long as they can read.
If we had a game similar to the way this one works that taught math when I was in school, I would not have spent so many hours in agony. better that kids can play a game and draw out the lesson themselves.
I agree! While I do rely heavily on curriculum, I love how this introduces the concept without stress.