Free Homeschool Math Games Perfect for a Friday Afternoon!
After a really busy week of homeschool, there is nothing better than putting the core curriculum away and playing! These free homeschool math games are one of our favorite activities for a Friday afternoon.
I know, who does math for fun? We do! In fact, we all love math in this house!
I honestly believe the fact that we have fun with math is one of the reasons we don’t dread it in our homeschool. These free math games from Beast Academy Playground are so much fun for elementary-aged kids. It won’t feel like they are doing math at all!
**Disclosure: I was compensated for my time to write this post. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. I only share resources that I would use with my own family and those that I believe other homeschool families will enjoy. There may be affiliate links in this post.**
We love playing educational board games and playing these offline free math games from Beast Academy Playground. You will also enjoy our top 20 math board games for kids of all ages.
Beast Academy Playground
We already knew Beast Academy (we use it as our math curriculum, see below) was awesome before we found out about their free math games. But at first glance, I didn’t think there would be anything that would be suitable for Freddie (who is now 12 years old.).
All of the games have either 4+ or 5+ age rating, despite the fact you can search for kids aged 12 and over. However, do not let this fool you.
We had a really busy week with map testing for homeschoolers this week so when Friday came I wanted to have more of a fun day. I told Freddie to go to the playground and choose what math games he wanted to do.
He got so excited! Like really excited! I said he could choose 3 math games and we would do them together or independently whichever he wanted.
Beast Academy Playground is completely free for everyone, why don’t you check it out for yourself now.
Check out our favorite free homeschool curriculum too!
Cartographer
Cartographer was the first math game that caught his eye. The first time he decided to play alone and see how many colors he needed to color all of the States of America. (Find fun ways to learn the 50 States with our top tips.)
The aim of the “game” is to find out how many different colors you would need to color in the 50 states without the same color touching any of the borders!
Math Skills Learned: Math history, counterexamples (it was believed until the 1970’s that it would actually take 5 different colors to complete this task).
The second time we played the game, we played together competitively. We took it in turns to color in a state (we had 2 colors each) and the loser was the person who couldn’t color in a new state. Well, let’s just say that loser was me!
Pig
This is such a simple but really fun free math game. To play Pig all you need are two dies, a score sheet, and 2 pens. Now, normally you would write your names at the top of the scoresheet and not the color.
Clearly, Freddie is more of a visual learner as he has copied the titles of the images from Beast Academy!
The aim of the game is to roll as many times as you can to get to the number 50. However, you must proceed with caution because if you roll a 1 you have to start again from your first roll of that round.
Math Skills Learned: Addition, probability, strategic thinking.
It wasn’t a great day for me, as Freddie (or should I say Red!) won this game too!
Odds vs Evens
This is a similar game to rock, paper, scissors which we love to play. In fact, Freddie and I will often play it on car journeys (not when I am driving of course!). This free offline math game from Beast Academy Playground is another game you are going to love.
One player is odds and the other is evens, then call 1, 2, 3, shoot, and hold up 0-5 fingers. Add up the 2 fingers and if they add up to an even number the winner is whoever decided to be even.
Math Skills Learned: Odd and even numbers, probability, shortcut (does it really matter what number you hold up?), strategy.
Other free math worksheets are:
Beast Academy Math Books
We have been using Beast Academy this year as our math curriculum and my son genuinely loves it. It is not like any other boring homeschool math curriculum, he gets to read a fun comic and then answer math questions.
As so much of his homeschool curriculum is online we opted for workbooks (but you can do online if you prefer.)
If you are thinking of using Beast Academy as your core curriculum I highly recommend taking their free placement tests, as it is definitely aimed at kids who excel in math.
I hope you have fun with these free math games, let me know what your favorites are in the comments below.
Last Updated on 2 September 2024 by Clare Brown