My son has been struggling with subtraction with renaming. (I also called it "borrowing"). He sees two numbers and he consistently subtracted the smaller number from the higher number, no matter which number is on top. To get extra practice in double-digit subtraction beyond the worksheets, I decided we had shake things up a bit with a playing cards game!
My idea was to make a subtraction game challenge with playing cards! We only used the A and 2-9 cards. We chose two cards to be our "target number" and four each with which to make a subtraction problem. By rearranging our four cards and finding the difference between them, we could find which combination would get us closest to the target number. We had a lot of fun doing this.
By laminating the workpage, my son could write on it and then reuse it for the next problem.
I also made up some cute playing cards for the littlest kids!
This set has cards numbered 1-10 with apples, hearts, suns, and stars. This deck of 40 cards is available for a minimal fee at my shop and at Teachers Pay Teachers. For fun, I included some math game ideas. I include this subtraction game idea, as well as number recognition and greater than/less than game ideas too. I think these playing cards are a lot of fun!
If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you’ll know I love incorporating learning moments into familiar parts of our lives, especially reading favorite picture books. Here are some of our favorite preschool picture book lessons. Some of these book-inspired preschool lessons I’ve blogged about. To see the picture book preschool activities
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