Tiny Polka Dot Game Rules

Tiny Polka Dot is a game developed by Dan Finkel and the crew at Math for Love. It is essentially a set of nice, pleasing cards with dots on them, spanning from 0 to 10. Some of the dots are ordered, while others are intentionally disorganized. The deck comes with a set of cards that give the rules for simple games that kids can play. Most of the games are perfect for kids between the ages of 3 and 7, although there are some activities that were fun and challenging for me!

This morning, my son and I decided to play a game. I got all the cards with numbers from 1to 6 and placed them face-down in rows. Our goal was to pick two cards. If the cards add to 7, you keep the pair and pick again. J has been playing all sorts of matching games at school recently, so this felt like a mathy spin on his current favorite game.

During the game, I noticed that J had some of the pairs memorized. When he flipped over a 6, he would say Now I just need a 1. When he flipped over a 5, he knew he needed a 2.

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So during one turn, J flipped over a 2 and a 6, counted to 8, and flipped them back over. I asked him When you flip over a 2, what card do you need to make seven? J paused, then flipped the cards back over and looked at them again...

At first, this seems like a redundant question. After all, J knows that five and two make seven, right?But that's not actually what J knows. He knows that if he

This feels like the same thing to a parent, but to a young kid it's a very different question. He doesn't yet know that 5 + 2 = 2 + 5. He hasn't internalized the commutative property. So he is starting this question from the beginning.

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Anyway, J is pondering over these two cards, and he decides to count them again. He counts to eight, then pauses before saying Seven I ask him Two and seven make seven? and he scrunches his nose to indicate that yeah, that doesn't sound exactly right. So he counts again, gets to eight, and this time says One. Again, I prompt: Two and one make seven? And he says no, they make three. I think that in each case, J is noticing that his total of eight dots is one too many, but he doesn't know how that affects the answer to my question. First he compensates in the wrong direction, then he answers one because he is thinking about the one extra dot.

So he counts again, gets to eight, pauses and then says 4? I can tell he's starting to lose track of the problem, so I cover up two dots with my thumb and say Ok, let's check. Does two and four make seven dots? He counts and quickly says No, five! So I cover up a single dot and he counts to confirm. Success! Two and five make seven!

Later on, we finish the game and are comparing how many matches we each made. I've already counted my eight matches, but J mixed all his cards together, so he can't easily count them. He starts matching each pair again, painstakingly counting dots as he assembles his line Again, from my perspective he could just match the cards up randomly and then count the pairs, but J is still working on how addition works. So he's going to match them all up first and then count.

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I love a lot of little things in this video: the way you can tell when he is confident in his matches and the moments when he has to count to confirm. The way he counts the first row of his cards, then swipes his hand and says Twenty! The way he guesses that I have 18 cards. After all, he had ten pairs and twenty cards, which is just ten more. I have eight pairs so I must have eighteen cards. It's a fantastic hypothesis, and it reminds me that kids have ideas about math. Those ideas make sense, even if they are wrong. Joel used a shortcut that worked, but then applied it in a different scenario where it no longer worked. And he'll keep doing that over and over for the rest of his mathematical life.

Oh yeah, my review. Tiny Polka Dot is absolutely fantastic. It gives J a structure that he enjoys exploring, and when he tires of the Match 7 game, we will move on to Match 8, Match 9, or any of the dozens of games and iterations we can create from these cards. These cards are going to be part of our playtime for years to come.The award winning game Tiny Polka Dot by Math for Love is anything but a single game, rather its a deck of multiple representations of the numbers zero to ten with limitless possibilities. As a mathematics educator I have found the decks useful to share with my students (who are future elementary school teachers) mostly around how they support various aspects of developing number sense, promote numeral recognition, and provide opportunities to learn a variety of mathematics concepts and habits of mind through games.

Image: The number 7 represented in all decks. What do you notice about the differences in arrangements? The shadow of my hand and phone let’s you know this is authentic 🙂

Tiny Polka Dot Card Game

Rather than give a comprehensive overview of all the things you can do to teach with a Tiny Polka Dot game in your hand, I will share a little bit about how I have been reaching for the deck to do spontaneous game play to support the mathematical topics my first grade son is learning about through crisis distance learning. And along the way, make a little sense of how I select which representations and why.

I’m a firm believer in playing games to learn, and in having the right tools for the job. The Tiny Polka Dots deck is can be a useful tool for parents, for spontaneous game play that reenforces emerging concepts, and for more target game play to help children make sense of strategies new to them.

One way I use the deck spontaneously is as a resource for cards with multiple useful representations of numbers 0-10. Yay to not having to search the internets for the images we want, right? So we aren’t always playing a game against each other with rules or points. Sometimes, I select a type of representation, a random number, and I flash the card and my son has to tell me how many dots he saw (it’s a variation on quick images or dot talks, you can see this resource from youcubed.org if you aren’t familiar with them.) This purposeful selection of the representation of the number helps scaffold the activity, and in some cases increase or decrease the challenge by either providing structure for the student to make sense of and use to subitize, or provide a more free-from representation that the student has to impose a structure on or make sense of. I like to use the blue deck to help my son get familiar with how to use the structure of the ten frame to subitize (ie, notice and make use of structure, like the math practice says). Other times I use the red deck because the different colored dots suggest groupings but don’t organize the dots into arrays, so he has to think a little more about

Tiny Polka Dot Game

Image: number 9 represented as (from left to right), random dots, domino pattern, and in a ten frame . What do you notice about the available structure or lack of structure, and how might you impose a structure on the random dots to “see” the nine?

Another way I use the deck is to play familiar games with intentionally-chosen representations of numbers, to support emerging concepts. Right now, they are learning about the strategy of using near doubles to solve their addition number facts. From my eaves-dropping during the zoom class, I gather that this feels like a leap to a lot of the students, who are most comfortable using counting-on strategies (putting one number in their head, and counting up from it until they’ve counting up by the second number.) One way I see this showing up in my son is ask him to solve any small addition problem like 4 + 5, and he will put up 5 fingers say “four” and then count up from there putting one finger down each time. “Four, .. five, six, seven, eight, nine. It’s nine.” The teacher also has acknowledge that this strategy might seem weird or hard at first. I won’t get into my views on how and when to introduce different strategies for addition, because that’s not important. In the curriculum the teacher is following, this is the next major strategy introduced.

But surprise surprise, my son, and

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