TOS Product Review: Pyramath

Because I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew, the boys and I got to try out a fun way to reinforce basic math skills.

 Pyramath card game is one of four fun but educational games offered at the I See Cards website.  The cards are bright and colorful and have the numbers 0-9 with English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Roman and French numerical translation and symbols.  You can play a 5 or 7 card game in which you add, subtract, multiply or divide numbers on adjacent cards to build a pyramid.

One player can work to better his own time or two players can compete to see who can complete a pyramid first.   The site also offers a free online version of the game and a wiki for teachers with lesson ideas for classroom use.  The booklet that comes with the cards describes variations of the game for younger learners as well as steps to make it more challenging as a student’s skills improve.

Here is one of our examples of the game.  My boys preferred the 5 card version.

No, I don’t normally have a display board covering our school table, but I’m in the middle of putting together a timeline so we’ve all just been working around (or on) my project in progress lol.

Ds prefers the online game and even figured out a few tricks I didn’t know you could do (such as spreading out the cards you’ve drawn but not used.)

A 56 card deck costs only $6.95 (Florida residents like me pay a 7% sales tax.)  The site offers three other games, Fractazmic for learning fractions, Prime Bomb for prime numbers, factors and multiplication, and I See Cards which combine language and basic math learning in one.

Pyramath is a fun and inexpensive resource for improving skills with basic math functions.  The game is easy to figure out, quick and portable, all assets to homeschooling families.  My boys enjoyed both the physical card game and the online version.  I love the price and the look of the cards.  I don’t really understand why so many translations of each number are on the cards but I did use the Roman version with ds3, the English for ds4 (just learning number names) and ds2 benefited from the Spanish.  Ds3 had a little trouble grasping that a single number could represent a double digit answer…if a 5 was next to a 2 you could play a 0 to represent 10.  Other than that we had no problems at all.

I received a deck of Pyramath cards for review purposes and no other compensation for giving my honest opinion.