Description
How it works
Spread the array cards face up. Players take turns handing an array to the person on their right, who must use a marker to split it in two, or lay a 10s array underneath, and explain how that produces the fact. Given a 9×6, a player might pull the 10×6 card and show 10×6 − 1×6 = 9×6, or partition it as 5×9 + 1×9. A correct explanation scores a point; first to ten wins. This is a reasoning game, not a recall game — it teaches children how to get to a fact they have not memorised.
What you’ll need
- The printable array cards for the 3s, 6s, 9s and 10s, labelled with their facts
- One marker per player — uncooked spaghetti, a coffee stirrer or a thin straw all work
Skills practiced
The Adding a Group and Subtracting a Group strategies, the distributive property, and deriving unknown facts from known ones.
Grade level
3rd through 5th grade. The cards also work without the game — laying one array over another reveals patterns like 3×8 being 3×4 doubled.
Instant PDF download. Game instructions and printable array cards adapted from the ideas in Math Fact Fluency by Jennifer Bay-Williams and Gina Kling (ASCD / NCTM, 2019).
