Learning about Math with a Deck of Cards

May 9, 2026 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

One of the best low cost math learning items you can have at home or in the classroom is a deck of cards.

There are so many simple things you can do with a deck (especially if you make it a “math deck” as Denise at Let’s Play Math calls them, which is a regular deck with jacks, queens, kings and jokers removed).

Call the ace a one and practice identifying numbers and counting from one to ten.

Use cards to count out a number of items to reinforce one to one correspondence.

Draw a card and then count up or down from that number. Or arrange cards by suits and then put the cards in number order.

Pull several cards and add, subtract, multiply or divide those numbers. Or draw several cards and write out and say the number that you get (so drawing a four, six and two would give you 462).

And of course you can play lots of games with playing cards that help reinforce math concepts.

Math Geek Mama has a great collection of math games you can play with cards for learning various math concepts, including sorting and counting, addition and subtraction, place value, prime numbers, fractions and decimals, multiplication, exponents, order of operations and metric conversions.

One of the ones that caught my eye because it’s such a great thing to do with a couple of kids, or a kid and a parent, or in pairs in a classroom, is playing variations on war. This idea comes from Denise Gaskin’s Let’s Play Math, and it goes beyond the basic whose card is higher to include ideas like adding two cards together and the winner is the higher number.

Of course there are tons of variations there, too, because you could also subtract, multiply, make numbers into fractions, decide some suits or colors are positive or negative numbers and more.

Check out both posts for lots of fun ways to play and learn math with a deck of cards!

[Photo: Math Geek Mama]

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Make Unpoppable Bubbles You Can Play with Inside

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

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