Teacher Innovates Maths Lessons with Playing Cards

A regular at The Links, Paul Smit is also a school teach who’s come up with a unique concept for introducing kids to playing cards while also learning maths.

“I teach Grades Three and Four, and I thought there had to be a more fun way to teach them multiplication and division than just rote learning.” Smit says. “Then I saw my child counting numbers on the decks of cards we have at home, and realised it could become a game!”

He took a deck of cards to school the next day, and assigned operations to the different suits. Then he dealt the cards from 2 to 10 out to the class.

“I decided not to use the honours or the aces, because I didn’t want to confuse the kids. In a class of 32, each child gets a card and a chance to play. Spades are multiplication, hearts are division, diamonds addition, and clubs subtraction. We’ll stand in a circle and the sum will go round until we hit a decimal. Then we’ll start again from that child.”

He wrote out an example for us:

5S, 3D, 3H, 2C = 5×3=15+3=18/2=9

“We’re ignoring the BODMAS rule for now because they haven’t started learning it yet, so the order of operations just goes around the circle with the operator applied to the next card’s value. It’s also been interesting to see the kids realise that some whole numbers can’t be divided evenly, so the Grade Fours are starting to apply the rules of decimals and rounding up or down to the sums. We’re having a blast with the game.”

When asked if he plans to teach the children how to play bridge, Smit laughs.

“I’ve just started learning the game myself, but who knows? Maybe it’ll become an extracurricular option in the near future!”