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This St. Patrick’s Day roll and cover dice game is a great way to help children practice counting, number recognition, and one-to-one correspondence. With four free printable game boards, this St. Patrick’s Day math game is perfect for home or the classroom!
Who doesn’t love a good themed activity for teaching your little ones? Somehow, when you make an activity special to a specific holiday or theme, it becomes that much more exciting – even if it’s for something that you’ve done before.
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These St. Patrick’s Day roll and cover game boards are exactly that in our house – a new, seasonal spin on a skill we’ve practiced well before.
But, because we made it into a game, it’s something we can play together, which adds a bit of competition and makes it all the more fun!
What are the Benefits of Roll and Cover Dice Games?
Roll and cover games are a fun way to teach math for young kids. They are especially good for hands-on learners!
Children have fun counting and practicing one to one correspondence as they count the dots on the dice. They’ll need to practice recognizing those number to find them and cover them on their game board.
Finally, when played with other players, these roll and cover boards make a great St. Patrick’s Day math game with some friendly competition for family game night or math centers.
Supplies:
- Free printable St. Patrick’s Day Roll and Cover game mats
- Math cubes, or other manipulatives for covering numbers on the game boards
- Other ideas are: pom poms, small squares of paper, counting chips, cotton balls, etc. You can really use anything you have on hand.
- Dice
- You can use a regular dice from another board game.
- These foam dice are also fun to use and have on hand for kids’ games like this.
- Laminator, page protectors, or reusable dry erase pockets to protect your game boards
- We just put ours in regular page protectors – the same way we make our dry erase work books, but we might end up laminating them to keep them year after year.
How to Play:
- Download and print St. Patrick’s Day roll and cover game boards.
- Laminate each game board, or insert them into pouches.
- Have each player take turns rolling the dice, counting the number of dots on the dice and covering that number each time it appears on their mat.
- The player that covers all spaces first is the winner.
- For a quicker game, every player can cover the numbers on their mat with each roll of the dice – no matter which player rolls it.
- Alternatively, you can use these mats with just one child to help practice counting and number recognition without the multi-player game aspect.
And that’s it! We have had a lot of fun playing this together during school time or just as a fun game! Since it’s mostly luck to win, it’s always fun to see who will cover their card first.
For more fun St. Patrick’s Day activities your kids will enjoy, be sure to check out these posts:
St. Patrick’s Day Tracing Sheet
Leprechaun Sand Science Experiment
How fun! That looks like a great family night game, too!
We definitely played it as a family over here!