Do your kids need to review basic math? Develop reading readiness? Figure out how to reduce fractions?

Cooperation Concentration is an easy game for parents to make themselves and use to help their kids learn, review, or reinforce all kinds of basic skills.

Basic Cooperation Concentration

You can get the hang of Cooperation Concentration by playing it with a deck of Old Maid cards or regular playing cards. After that, you should be able to make up your own sets of cards to help your children review particular skills.

If your Old Maid deck has shrunk, that’s OK. Just be sure you have 14 to 20 pairs, plus the Old Maid odd card.

If you’re using regular playing cards instead of Old Maid cards, use a Joker for the Old Maid.

Any number can play this game, but you must have at least two players.

The object of the game is to see how many pairs the players can find together before someone turns up the Old Maid.

Shuffle the deck and lay the cards out in rows, face down.

Player 1 turns over two cards. If they are a pair, he lays them aside, face up.

If they are not a pair, he replaces them face down again, and everyone tries to remember where those particular cards are located.

Player 2 then turns up another two cards, trying to find and keep a pair.

Since this is a cooperative effort, players keep the pairs in a common pile and help each other locate pairs.

When someone turns over the Old Maid, the game is over. 

Count the pairs you collected as a team and start over.

Try to see if you can collect more pairs next game, before the Old Maid shows up.

Modify the game for review

Suppose you have a first grader who needs to review the alphabet. Make alphabet cards from pieces of cardstock cut into the same size or use a stack of 3-by-5 index cards.

Make two A’s, two B’s, etc. Then make two Time cards: write the word Time or draw a clock picture on two cards.

Now play the game the same way you played it with Old Maid cards, using the Time cards to end the game like an Old Maid odd card.

Since this game has more pairs, it has two odd cards instead of one.

So this time, when you turn up the first Time card, you keep on playing, leaving the Time card face up. When you turn up the second Time card, the game ends.

One additional rule makes review and reinforcement possible:

Every time someone turns up a card, he must say its letter name out loud. When he finds a pair, he must name it correctly, or else he will not be able to keep it.

And since this game is cooperative, whenever a child doesn't know a letter, the other players tell him what it is.    

Making this game both good review and good fun requires parents to be flexible.

If your child forgot the whole alphabet over the summer and can’t remember any of it, for example, don’t waste time making him feel bad because he doesn’t know as much as you think he should. 

Just make the game simpler.

The more your child succeeds, the more he’ll want to play. And the more he plays, the more he’ll learn.

To teach the alphabet over from scratch, put most of the cards aside and start out with only five letter pairs and one Time card.

Play until your child knows those letters, then add a few new ones.

Keep adding new letters gradually.

Take as many days or weeks as your child needs with the game to learn the letters.

Add a second Time card when you get up to 15 or 16 pairs.

Modify the game to review math.

To review math, you match cards instead of pairing them. One card will show a problem (3 + 7) and its matching card will show the answer (10).

You can review addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts this way.  

To review fraction reduction, match an unreduced fraction (6/8) with its equivalent (3/4).

For children who are not yet abstract thinkers, always match a picture card to a number card.

For example, review numbers by matching a numeral to a picture showing that many items; review fractions by matching a written fraction with a picture showing that fraction.

Other modifications

You can make matching cards for the alphabet, too, matching uppercase letters—A, B, C—with lowercase letters—a, b, c.

Or you can teach children to recognize cursive writing by matching a printed word with its equivalent written in cursive. Players should say the word or letter out loud in order to be permitted to keep each matching pair.

Just be sure to make a Time card for every 15 to 20 matching pairs in your game. The game ends when the final Time card is turned up.

© Becky Cerling Powers 1994 updated 2024

Use with attribution only   www.beckypowers.com

For more insights from Becky Cerling Powers see her book Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive in the Bookstore

Holiday planning: No one offered me their place in line

Wasn’t that foolish?

I could have waited until February.

And if they didn’t, shame on them.

So…how can you tame December?

First, write down your priorities.

Second, plan with those priorities in mind

Then – it’s a free country, after all! – choose to let less important activities slide.

People drank too much and then got into loud arguments that caused hurt feelings.

Their solution?

Third, figure out your limits and accept them.

Learn to say no.

Set an early date for adult-only projects

BUT IT COMES EVERY SINGLE YEAR!

Our son Erik was a visual learner who picked up the skill of reading quickly as a kindergartner after only two or three weeks of simple home phonics lessons. Once he “clicked” on reading, he read all the easy-to-read books he could find.

He usually read them many times.

I thought he was ready for something harder the summer after first grade. By then he read easy books fluently, and he had a hardy attention span. He could sit attentively for a half hour or more at a time while we read him long children’s classics like C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at bedtime.

So I suggested he try reading The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, a book he was familiar with because I had read it aloud.

He was ecstatic to find out he could read a novel-length book.

Every day, he reported his progress: “Mom, I’m on page 67!” or “Mom, I’ve read 200 pages!!”

Not every child is ready to tackle such hard books at age 7. Two equally bright children may reach reading readiness at different ages—even five or six years apart.

Our son Matt was a late bloomer who finally “clicked” on reading at age 10.

Yet he, too, was reading novel-length books within two years after he began reading.

For both boys, the key to moving on to the hard books was twofold. First, as parents we built up our children’s vocabulary by reading them many stories that were written well beyond their reading level.

Second, as newbie readers, the boys developed fluency by reading many easy books over and over.

Reading Fluency: Don’t rush kids into harder books too soon

Author and educator Ruth Beechick states that encouraging reading fluency is an important step that parents (and schools) tend to skip by pushing children on to harder and harder reading materials.

This is a mistake, she says, because reading lots of easy books helps developing young readers in several essential ways. First, it gives them practice with decoding skills until these skills become over-learned and automatic. It also helps them learn and relearn the common words that make up a large percentage of all books, including difficult ones.

 Reading Fluency: Reading lots of easy books helps children read more smoothly and rapidly

It also helps them develop comprehension, instead of losing the sense of a passage while struggling to deal with difficult vocabulary and decoding at the same time. Finally, reading lots of easy books helps youngsters find out that reading can be fun.

But what is an easy book? The answer varies from reader to reader.

Beechick explains that every child has three reading levels at all times:

·       A frustration level

·       A learning level

·      And a comfort level.

(These levels provide a way to rate books, not a way to rate individual children.)

She says to rate a book, mark off a section of about 100 words, and ask your child to read it to you aloud.

The frustration level

If your kiddo has trouble reading more than five words, the book is at that child’s frustration level. It has so many new words that the child cannot follow the sense of the story.

Avoid pushing kids to read at their frustration level. Set aside the book for a while.

Kids who are pressured to read books at their frustration level become reluctant readers. It makes them want to give up on reading.

The learning level

If your kids miss three to five words in the 100-word section, the book is at their learning level.

This is a book for you to read together. Take turns reading every other paragraph or page. Whenever Junior encounters a problem with a word, you can help him solve it.

The comfort level

If your kiddo misses two words or less in the 100-word section, the book is at their comfort level. It’s an easy book. They can read it independently and understand the story well.

It’s a good book for a child to read alone or to a younger brother or sister. Reading many books at this comfort level will improve a child’s reading fluency.

Here’s how to teach kids to test themselves when choosing library books.

·   Tell them to read a page in the book (assuming that a page will have from 100 to 200 words on it) and

·   Use their fingers to count the words they don’t know.

·   Whenever they run out of fingers on one hand, the book is probably too hard.

If the simplest books in the library are on kids’ frustration level, it means they don’t really know how to read yet.

In that case, you need to back up and figure out whether or not your child has reached reading readiness yet.

(Beechick’s book, The Three R’s, includes information about ways to tell when a child is ready to read.) If your kiddo is ready, you can try to teach them to read using a good phonics program.

However, if your kiddo shows symptoms of dyslexia, such as

• writing letters and figures backwards

• confusing the order of letters in words

• (and look up “dyslexia symptoms” online for a more comprehensive list)

you’ll need more help.

 Testing in the schools is uneven. Parents are more likely to obtain the most up to date testing for dyslexia by asking their pediatrician for a referral to a child psychologist to address that specific issue.

 The Orten Gillingham system appears to be the one phonics reading system that has shown proven success with people who struggle with reading.

 Resource: The Three R’s by Ruth Beechick includes a reading section (telling how and when to begin phonics and how to develop comprehension skills) a language section (showing how to develop written language skills naturally) and an arithmetic section (explaining how to teach children to understand math concepts). Beechick explains the reading process simply. She gives directions for providing reading readiness activities, introducing phonics, teaching children to read using real books, testing children’s reading level, and tutoring spelling. ISBN13:978-0-88062-173-1 

© Becky Cerling Powers 2021

Reprint with attribution only (www.beckypowers.com)

You can find more parenting insights from Becky Cerling Powers in Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive in the Bookstore