Mummy Math

This Halloween math game is a simple and fun way to practice math facts with children in the early elementary grades.

I have a confession - I've been a lazy homeschooler lately. It's just been me and Christopher and Nathan at home. Christopher's in 2nd grade. I've already done 2nd grade twice. I'm just cruising through things. But then the other day Christopher saw a picture of some of the fun school activities I had done with Maren and Joshua when they were his age and he figured that he was missing out on something. He asked when we were going to do something fun for school and made me feel a bit guilty. Sigh. Fine.

This game I call "Mummy Math" because I like the alliteration, but you could adapt it for reading too.

I cut out a mummy shape and then wrapped it in it's mummy clothes. Christopher's been working on his multiplication up through x5s, so I wrote numbers 2-5 on each piece of the mummy's wrapping strips on the left side, and on the right side I wrote the numbers 2-10.

To play the game, Christopher would pull back one flap of the mummy wrap on the left side, and then one on the right side, and multiply the two numbers together. If he got it right, he went again. His goal was to get the whole mummy unwrapped (because I had put a couple of jelly beans underneath the paper).

Nathan (preschool) also wanted to play, so I made a new mummy wrapping for him. This wrapping had a beginning sound on the left side and a word ending such as "at" or "ot" on the left side. Some of the words did not make sense when he smooshed the beginnings and ends together, but that's okay. He was just practicing sounding out words and laughed when we made a nonsense word.

Nathan also wanted to color in his mummy.

To play at your home or school, download the mummy template, print it on cardstock and cut it out. The kids can decorate their mummy if they like. Print out the wrappings template onto regular printer paper. I find the regular paper stays wrapped around the mummy a bit better than cardstock.

(And for some reason when you click the link, you may not be able to see the preview of both pages but both should be in the same document when you download it to your computer. I'm not a computer genius but I'm trying my best. Hopefully it will work for those who want to use it.)

click here for mummy outline and mummy wrapping 

You can cut around the outside of the mummy wrapping and then have the kids cut on the dotted lines to make the linen. (Fine motor skills practice! Yay!)  You can either write in the numbers/letters yourself or let the kids do it based on your instructions.

As a motivator (instead of sugar) you could cut out several mummies and write a joke on each one. Then once the child has answered the problems and unwrapped the mummy they could trade mummies for a new joke to uncover. Just a thought.

Other ways to use this idea:

 - have the kids apply the same operation to every number they open (ie. always multiply by 4, add 3, subtract 1 . . .)

- have the kids tell you what number they would have to add to "make 10" (i.e., if they open the number 7, they would tell you 3)

- as a matching game - write the same sight words on both sides of the page then have the child to find the matching words. If they find them they keep them open. If they don't make a match they wrap them back over the mummy. This could be a way to play this game with another person.

- matching number words to numbers, or color words to colors

I hope you find this idea useful for your Halloween School activities! Be sure to check out other ways we make learning fun around this time of year:

Halloween Book Activities

Candy Corn Math

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