Pelmathism

Choose one of the 7 Pelmathism Games, they are all played to the same rules. The cards illustrate numbers and show them written as fractions, decimals and percentages. Each number occurs twice in the pack of 36 cards in 2 of the possible representations.

Shuffle the cards and place them face down on a table, either in rows and columns or just spread out. Players take turns to turn over 2 cards. Whenever the cards match, the player keeps the pair and gets another chance to turn  over 2 cards. If the cards don’t match, they are turned face down keeping the same positions and the next player has a turn. The winner is the player with the most pairs when all the pairs of cards have been claimed.

Click here to download cards for Fractions, Decimals, Percentages and Illustrations, the most challenging version of FDP Pelmathism. To make the game easier, play with 6 pairs of cards, then later with 10, then 18. Before you play, sort the cards into pairs, choose which pairs you are going to play with and shuffle them. Alternatively download other sets of cards with just 2 representations of the fractions.

• Game 1 – Fractions and Illustrations, then progress to playing
• Game 2 – Fractions and  Decimals, (remember that to turn a fraction into a decimal you divide the numerator by the denominator),
• Game 3 – Decimals and Illustrations,
• Game 4 – Fractions and Percentages,
• Game 5 – Percentages and Illustrations,
• Game 6 – Decimals and Percentages.

Create your own Pelmathism game for other topics. Download a set of blank cards and create many variations of this game. For example, match pictures to the names of the objects, match calculations to the answers, match numbers to the same number written as a product of prime factors, or match diagrams to statements of theorems. There are more possibilities.

For young children you could make a set of cards with simple addition sums as shown here, and you could include cards with different numbers of dots to count. Make new cards when your children are ready for a bigger challenge.