Maths and Monopoly

Baba has been off preschool all this week, he has a stonking cold and awful cough and really hasn’t had a full nights sleep since Sunday so a long with everything else is really battling tiredness.

We have been having a few quiet days to try to make sure it doesn’t last too long as he seems to constantly be ill at the moment!

But we have been playing a few games.

For Christmas Baba got Junior Monopoly as a present from us, he is into board games and we wanted to get him one that would he would grow into as he doesn’t have his birthday until October.

The first time we played it was a bit of a disaster. He pretty much had a meltdown every time he had to pay someone some money. He didn’t want to lose any of his money and had to have the exact amount that he started with. He really wasn’t getting the idea at all.

But as the weeks have gone Monopoly has become one of his firm favourite games.

We do simple it down a little as he is only four, but he understand’s the concept and he is actually very good at the game.

Yesterday we sat down and played the game and Baba decided that he wanted to be the banker. I wasn’t sure at first but we went with the flow.

I was very impressed.

His number recognition is getting fantastic, he can look at the board and see what he has to pay to the banker, or to the other player, or what you owe him and work out paper money he needs to pay the bill.

But something else that was really interesting was that he was trying to do some very basic maths skill with the game. If for instance he owed £3.00 he was trying to work out how to make £3.00 by using a two and asking what was then needed to make it into £3.00. He did this a lot or would do basic subtraction by giving you £5.00 when he owed you £4.00.

It was lovely to see how eager he was to work out the maths, and how excited he was when he realised he understood it.

Last night he sat down with Daddy and had a game between the two of them and was so happy telling Daddy that “2 plus 1 equals 3”

It is a really simple but effective way for him to start learning and it has highlighted to us how eager he is to learn letters and numbers at the moment!