Remember the Mother Goose rhyme about someone on the road to St. Ives who meets "a man with seven wives" each holding a bag containing a cat and seven kittens? In asking "how many," it poses a type of math game, the word puzzle, that has been popular since ancient times. Math games and the study of mathematics developed together.
The University of Chicago's "Everyday Math" program says that math games can speed up a child's ability to calculate and reason. "Drill tends to become tedious and, therefore, gradually loses its effectiveness. Games relieve the tedium because children enjoy them." Everyday Math is particularly famous for its Minute Math games which include activities to play while waiting in lines, dining, driving in the car or transitioning from one activity to another.
While some math games take a few minutes, others can take hours. These include Monopoly, which teaches money skills, and Battleship, which helps with coordinate graphing. When exploring Internet game sites, a good rule of thumb is to allow at least 30 minutes play time since children may want to try more than one game at a site.
Textbooks and mass market books, such as "Family Math" and Kaye's "Games for Math" are rich sources of math fun including riddles, board games, card games and tangrams--pictures made from geometric shapes. Some of the best are designed by curriculum specialists. The Factor Game, created by the University of Michigan for it's Connected Math program, helps children to discover the meaning of prime numbers. You can access it online. Other online resources include CoolMath, which offers a wide range of games including Fraction Splat.
If a child needs practice with a particular concept, it is a good idea to provide more than one game aimed at that idea. To explore place value, "Family Math" suggests the games "Double Digit" and "Dollar Digit," which are also known as "Roll to 100" and are played in pairs. Each player takes turns rolling a single dice cube and recording his number in either the tens or ones, dimes or pennies, column of his paper gameboard. After seven turns apiece, the players add up their columns. The winner is the player who comes closest to 100 or to $1 without exceeding that amount.
Finally, if you observe and listen closely to children on the playground, you will often discover that they are using math by engaging in activities requiring skills such as counting and dividing into groups. These are fine teachable moments that adults can encourage while participating in the fun.