SNAP! Game for teaching counting and addition/subtraction

Once your children have mastered rolling and counting the pips on a die, it's time to play SNAP!! There are two ways to play:

For younger children:
*Put 21 snacks in the alligator's mouth.
*Take turns rolling a die, counting the pips and taking that many treats out of the mouth to eat
*The person who takes the last treat gets "snapped" by the alligator and has to say (loudly!) "Oh SNAP!" and pretend their hand got bitten. (You can demonstrate this--really act it up so your kids get into it!!)

For older children:
*put 31 snacks in the alligator's mouth
*roll 2 dice, add numbers together, and take out the number of snacks
*same thing--The person who takes the last treat gets "snapped" by the alligator and has to say (loudly!) "Oh SNAP!" and pretend their hand got bitten.

Problem-solving version: (no dice needed--2 player game)
*put 21 snacks in the alligator's mouth
*take turns taking 1 or 2 snacks out of his mouth
*the goal is to NOT take the last treat and get snapped (if you get "snapped" follow procedure above)
This will encourage your child to think about how many are left toward the end and create a strategy for not taking the last treat. It also helps introduce the basic concept of what odd and even numbers look like. Initially children won't really do much problem solving and it will fall more to chance, but the more they play the more they will understand how their decisions on how many to take effect the game and in what ways.

These are fun, quick and low maintnance games to play. I had these always available in my 1st grade classroom for kids to play when they had freetime and they LOVED it! The above gameboard is a laminated copy I had in my classroom. Here is a photo on the internet--really any open-mouthed alligator picture would work! You could even have your child draw an open-mouthed alligator if they were interested!