What to do with this activity?
Card games like Old Maid build your child´s concentration and thinking skills as well as building their skills in using numbers, seeing patterns and being able to group things together. Here's how to play it.
- Remove three of the queens from the deck. The remaining queen is the Old Maid.
- Deal all the cards as evenly as possible among the players.
- Players sort their own cards and discard any pairs. If a player has three of a kind , they discard two of the cards and keep the third.
- The dealer then offers their hand, face down, to the player on his left. That player randomly takes one card from the dealer. If the card matches one they already have in their hand, they put the pair down. If not, they keep it.
- Play continues in a clockwise direction, so the player to the left of the dealer then offers their hand, face down, to the player on their left. This cycle repeats until there are no more pairs and the only remaining card is the Old Maid.
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The game ends when the Old Maid is the only card in play. The person holding the Old Maid loses he game.
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Why am I doing this?
Everyday activities, like shopping and taking journeys provide a great opportunity for your child to practise maths skills by recognising patterns, counting out amounts, working out the best value, weighing and understanding money or understanding timetables and estimating your time of arrival!
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How can I do more?
Estimating is a very useful maths skill for everyday life – helping you decide if you have enough money to pay for a number of items or enough paint to paint a room. Encourage your child to estimate, for example, how many potatoes you will need for dinner or how much money to buy the shopping.
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