In a spin-off of the classic card game "Go Fish," the students will learn basic adding skills using the card game. Remove all the kings, jacks, queens and jokers from a deck of cards and deal each player seven cards. Leave the remaining, un-dealt cards in the middle of the table facedown in a pile or stack. The goal of the game is to pair up cards in a sequence, for example, a three card and a four card of any suit.
As in "Go Fish," have the students ask each other for the cards they need. For example, if a player has a three card, he can choose to ask another player if he has a four. When he pairs the three and the four together, he can visually see that a three card plus one card is four. Dealing with sequential numbers will help the students to absorb the relation of adding one.
If the child does not have the card he requested, the asking player "fishes" a card from the remainder of the deck. When all of the cards from the deck have been distributed and no more matches can be made, the children add up all of the pairs they have each made. The student with the most pairs wins.
As the website for Dr. Mike's Math Games for Kids suggests, once this game is mastered, use the same game concept to teach the concept of adding two. If a student has a three card, he would ask his neighbor for a five card to make his pair. The students will be constantly adding to the numbers in the cards in their hands to decipher which cards they need.