The lovely ppl at Orchard Toys sent me this Magic Cauldron Maths Game
a couple of weeks back when I was bewailing basic maths skills on twitter. You see, we have a bit of a problem here. It’s a confidence thing really, but quite a bit of the really basic maths stuff, like number bonds and timetables haven’t really sunk in yet for Big, and ways to practise them that are suitable for her age are few and far between. She does a lot of time on live mathletics, which will have to help, but it’s not nearly that much fun, so a game was just the right way to approach it.
The Magic Cauldron game *is* a bit basic. I think really it’s aimed at children a little younger than Big and Small – or maybe around Small’s age instead of his maths ability 😉 Having said that, we tweaked the rules a tiny bit and easily made it into a game we could *all* (me included) play and enjoy – we laid the answer tiles face down as a memory grid, and had to try to find one to give the answer that we wanted when we picked up a question from a pile. This raised the interest level somewhat, meaning they could still practise the maths without it being a game that would always be won by whoever started first. (They don’t tend to get basic stuff wrong. It just takes a while.)
I would think that this game would really go down well with children around 5 to 7, and the special bit on the card that you rub to check the answer did help to hold their attention. Only drawback to that was that when the game arrived it was cold, so it took a lot of rubbing to get the answer to show up. Suggest storing it somewhere warm 😉 The game is well made out of good quality card, and looks lovely, so all in all, I’m going to say it was a definite hit.
Thanks again to the lovely ppl at Orchard Toys for supplying this for review.
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