Lesson Ideas - Episode 4 - Playing Cards - Corbettmaths

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, I'm John Corbett or as a lot of people know me, Corbin Mavs and welcome to the fourth of this series of videos on lesson ideas. So in these videos I'm going to hopefully give teachers or training teachers or home educators some ideas of lessons and activities they might want to try with their students and these are ideas that I have found worked really well for me in the classroom and at home and hopefully these be useful for you as well. So in our first video we looked at the 1089 investigation. In the second episode we looked at silent lessons. In the third video, we looked at relay races of exam questions. And today in the fourth episode, we're going to be looking at playing cards. So, how we can use playing cards whenever we're teaching maths. And in terms of playing cards, I would have had 16 decks of these in the cupboard of the back of my classroom because I found them very handy to have in a classroom situation, but I also use them with my children at home as well. Now, with playing cards, um the first time I encountered playing cards, and they used to how handy they can be whenever you're teaching maths, was back at a teach in Bristol a long time ago, and I think a teacher called Sharon done a session how she used playing cards whenever she was teaching maths and some ideas. And then I quickly got some sets of these playing cards and then I used them with my students in my classroom as well. I found them to be absolutely fantastic and then for the many years after that, I used them quite a lot and I added and created new ideas and ways to use them. And then since I've been working on the website, I've also been using them with my children at home as well. Okay. And one thing I want to mention as well is that some teachers may not want to use playing cards.

[00:01:25]Whenever I was in school, I had a teacher who didn't like playing cards and and that's fine. What you can do is you can get just decks of cards with numbers on them and that would work as well. Okay? You could maybe color some in red and black and so on. So it doesn't necessarily need to be playing cards. You can use just decks of numbers and they would work as well. And if you're happy to use them, that's great as well. So, in terms of playing cards, how do I use them? So, I've used playing cards with students as young as three or four, like my my children at home, my son and my daughter who both use these playing cards with activities such as addition. And I'll talk about that in a second. And I've also used them in my classes in school from first year, second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year all the way up to my classes doing the GCSE maps I've used playing cards with. I just before I go through the activities, I just want to mention in terms of buying your playing cards, you can sometimes get multiacks of playing cards at quite good prices. So they might be quite useful as well whenever you're sourcing your playing cards. Okay. So let's go through some activities and how I would use them. So different based on the activities the playing cards would be used in different ways addition. So with my children at home the younger children what I done was first of all I got all the face cards and I took them away from the set.

[00:02:32]So out of the 52 cards I took away all the face cards and then that left me with the 40 of cards going from ace to 10. Um I would say ace we're going to say is one. So I would just explain that to the children. Okay, I would say like that's you know that is one. Then what I would do is when my children at home is I would just turn over two cards and I would say add them together. So I would go what's 10 + 4 and then they would say 14. You're like oh how fantastic well done. And then you go what's five + one and then they would say six. You fantastic. And you just go through four plus one. And for my children at home what I done was I didn't start off with the 40 cards. I think maybe I started off with 20. I just sort of went one two three four and I took 20. I just took 20 cards because then that would be 10 additions. And then I would just turn over and go four plus five. Then they would say nine. And obviously with this you're going to be doing it with students that can do up to 10 plus 10.

[00:03:21]Okay. So that's addition and it works really well in terms of how I've could just go through the deck. If you've got two children or more, you can actually do it as competitions where they perhaps turn over. You can get the 40 cards. So, if you're doing this in a class situation where you've got sort of pairs of students or you're home educating with more than one child, what you can do is perhaps split it into two sets of 20 and you can say, "Okay, both of you turn over one card each." And you can do a bit like snap where they turn it over.

[00:03:47]7 plus four, that's 11. And then whoever says it first gets those cards and a bit like snap where you're trying to win all the cards. So, the students can do it that way. they can sort of compete against each other and there for a certain amount of time and see who got the most amount of cards at the end of that time. So that would work quite well if you've got a class perhaps you've got some time at the end of the lesson. So if you're teaching in a primary school perhaps and you've got these playing cards what you can do is to have them perhaps just in the sets of 40 and then you could just give them out. If you've got 10 15 minutes left at the end of the lesson you can say deal them out and practice your addition game and then they just turn them over one at a time.

[00:04:24]five plus five 10 and then they can play just like snap and you can play for a certain amount of time and then at the end of the time just get them to count up the cards and see who's won. Okay, you could do it as a competition. So if it gets quite competitive perhaps you do in terms of a bit of a a knockout competition, see who can be the class champion. Or you might also want to vary who they play against each time. So rather than just always playing against the person they sit beside, it might be that you do the game for two minutes.

[00:04:49]You then get one person to stay where they are and one person to rotate. It's a bit like speed dating where one person stays and then their partner just shifts around and plays the next person for two minutes and so on and they can go around and play different people in the class and that way they get to perhaps play to people of different ability. They get to interact with other people as well. Um the way I would do it at home with my children too was I would actually use the 40 cards and I would use a stopwatch on my phone and I would sort of time them to see how quickly they can go through this the 40 cards to those 20 additions. So 10 + 1 11 and so on. And then on the stopwatch I can record their time and then maybe do it a week later, a week later. And that's what I used to do to see how they were progressing with their editions. That's how I would potentially use these with primary school children whenever they're in single digit well up to 10 plus 10 addition. And also how I would use it whenever I was working at home with my own children. And the great thing is obviously with addition, the quicker that you can be with these additions, it just brings back that sort of fluency, that recall. that you're much more quicker at the single day additions and then whenever it comes to the more challenging work then you'll be really good at additions subtraction it could work with subtraction as well and you would just say okay what you're going to do is you're going to do subtraction so we're going to turn over two cards and we're going to do the bigger one take away the smaller one so here we've got four take away one and four take away one is three and again you can do it in the same way where you could perhaps go through all 40 cards with your child at home or the students if you're working one to one. You can go, what is 4 takeway 1? That's three. Well done. What is 9 takeway 1? That's it. Well done.

[00:06:24]What is 6 take away six? That's zero.

[00:06:27]Well done. And so on. And you can do it that way. Perhaps even use a stopwatch and time them. Or you can do the same game as you were with your students with the additions, but do it with subtractions where they go one against one and play in the same way that they play snap where they have one card each and then just do the bigger one, take away the smaller one, and that would hopefully work as well. So there are two activities that you can do particularly with younger primary school children and also your children at home perhaps even some key stage two children if they need a bit of recap in terms of addition and subtraction or maybe a warm up before you go into your column addition and subtractions as well. Okay, multiplication. It would work well for multiplication. And I've actually used this up to students that are 16 in terms of I've had some GCSE classes. So maybe the the lower ability classes where they've struggled with their times tables. Perhaps we didn't have a computer lab or a computer suite to do TT rock stars. So we've used the playing cards for multiplication. That's probably the one that I use the most frequently for in the classroom whereas you just get them to do multiplications.

[00:07:26]And the same style. If you're working onetoone with a student, you can just turn them over. Do 9 * 10. 9 * 10 is 90.

[00:07:33]Well done. And you can do them one to one with a student. 3 * 9 27. And it just means rather than you having to think of these multiplications, you're turning them over. Um, you can do it one v one again like in a classroom situation. And that's what I would have done a lot. They would have split the cards 20 each and then actually done sort of like in the same way of snapped on one over each and then it would be then 8* 8 64. And whoever wins keeps the cards. in the same way as we done the addition and subtraction game. And what's great is that if you have done it with addition with a class, then you just say subtraction, they'll know the format of how to play it. So that's fantastic as well. And it's just doing loads of questions in a much more relaxed manner, in a less formal manner rather than sort of getting the exercise books out and doing loads of questions on multiplications, times tables, writing down all these questions. Often with multiplications, you want to be able to do them in your head. So this is just a a much more fun and enjoyable way for the students to practice these skills and they can do a lot of them quickly and it doesn't feel like they're doing maths as such. They're just playing a game. Um so with multiplications as I said you can play do it one to one and I've done this with my children at home. So for instance my daughter whenever she's perhaps I don't know seven years old something like that we were doing eight years old we were doing these multiplications at home. you can do with primary school children all the way up to as I said students doing GCSE maths and just need that extra practice and to be honest I've actually played it with my children as well and I get a bit competitive with them see who's the quickest okay so multiplication if you wanted to obviously with times tables it's quite useful to go up to 12 * 12 so you could if you wanted to introduce jacks and queens where jack is 11 and queen is 12 you could do it that way if you really want to push them on you can say king's 13 but I've never actually done that and we You can say jack is 11 and queen is 12. And then so likewise then if I done queen and an eight that's going to be 12 * 8 which is 96. So you can introduce the jack and the queen as well if you wanted to. Um and yeah. Okay. So multiplications it's worked really really well whenever top multiplications using the playing cards. It's just a fun way to do the multiplications. And again it's something that you can slip into the end of the lessons that if you've got a bit of spare time at the end of the lesson just get out the playing cards and do some multiplications and that's it. Okay, negative numbers. This is quite a good one in terms of perhaps it's black is a positive number and red is a negative number. So here we've got a positive number and a negative number.

[00:10:02]And then you can do different activities with positive and negative numbers. So perhaps you can order them. So put them in order. So you could this slightly differently. If you're working one to one, you can just turn over uh you can just turn over four cards perhaps. So here we've got -9, 8, -10, and three.

[00:10:21]And we want to put them in order from the lowest to the highest. So let's put them in order from the lowest to the highest. That would be -10, the lowest, -9, then three, and then eight. So they can order them. And that would work well if you were doing it one to one. Or even in classes, what you can do is just say to the class, okay, you've got the decks in your pairs. Take 20 cards each.

[00:10:41]You're going to work with 20 cards individually and you're going to work individually. Turn over four cards at a time and put them in order from the lowest to the highest and make sure that you know that the red ones are negative and the black ones are positive. And I think about that in terms of finance. So negative numbers also with negative numbers you can do all of these additions, subtractions and multiplications with your negative numbers. So you could do multiplication with them and then you can do it in the same way as multiplication game. So I've done this a lot with the first years and second years in secondary school. So we would actually just turn over two cards.

[00:11:12]-10 * -9. Well, negative* a negative is a positive. That's going to be 90. And so they can play their snap with the cards. Turn it over one each. So have 20 each. H. And then with the 20 each, just turn them over and play that competition again. And where you've got like red is negative and black is positive. So the next two here would be -9 * 6 and -9 * 6 would be 54 and so on. So we can use them in terms of multiplications. You could do it in terms of additions. So for instance, now in class, we're going to add them together. So we're going to do -6 + 1. -6 + 1 will be equal to5. And again, you can do all the same formats of games as we've played so far. So we can do the individually. So if you're tutoring somebody or working at home with somebody, you can do that sort of solo one where you get the 40 cards, time them, and see how long it takes them to multiply, add or subtract those negative numbers. Or you could even do it where you are doing it in pairs in a classroom situation where they're doing a bit of a competition where they've got 20 each and they're they're doing it that way as well. So I find it works really well with negative numbers. Okay, next one. Inequalities. So again, you could give them out the playing cards.

[00:12:21]Now, this one's going to be a slightly different format where what you'd want to do is give each of them three symbols as well. So perhaps make three cards, one with a greater than symbol, one with a less than symbol, and one with an equal symbol. And you could do it with just positive numbers. So you could go nine and 10. Well, then you would make sure that you put the inequality, the right inequality sign in there. Now, this one probably wouldn't be a competition against other people. It's just probably you working through perhaps give them 20 cards each where they and then they have to put the signs in the right places and maybe you do it with all of them. And so you can actually give them lots of less than equals to and greater than the symbols and then they've got to do with all 20 cards. But you could just do it with inequalities. You can even bring in the negatives and positives again here where we've got -2 and six. You put them down and then you saygative -2 is less than six. And you could do that if you wanted to. Or you could just keep it being positive numbers or positive and negative. It's up to you. But you just bring in some extra little cards where you've got less than, greater than, or equal to symbols. And that's again one that I've used at home with my children.

[00:13:23]Okay. Fractions. You could do it with fractions. Um where you perhaps put a pencil down on the table. So you put pencil down and what we're going to do is we're going to turn over the cards.

[00:13:32]So here we've got 9/10. And then with that fraction, what you can do is, you know, perhaps get them to write as decimals or perhaps you put them as topheavy and you put the bigger one above the smaller one and get them to write as mixed numbers. Or perhaps what you can do is you can do it where you say if it's if it's fully simplified or not. So they have to turn over two cards. Here we've got five sevens. Five sevens. That's fully simplified. So that's simplified. Okay. Next one. We have got two quarters. Now that's not simplified. So if we were to simplify that, that one would be a half and so on. So you can use it with fractions in terms of telling whether a fraction is simplified or not. You can do it in terms of tough heavy fractions where you say to the class, I want you to take take the cards and put the bigger one above the smaller one and then change it to a mixed number or suppose an integer.

[00:14:21]Um or suppose what you can do is you can do multiply and fractions where you put two pencils down and then you're going to multiply the two fractions together or add them and so on. Okay. Next place value. What you could do with the playing cards with place value is you could actually get them to get perhaps four cards. Put them all down. And here you've got four cards and you can give them challenges. And you can just say, "Okay guys, I just want to choose four of your cards, put them down." And then what I want you to do is class, can you all now make with your cards the biggest four-digit number? So then I would do seven, five, four, two. And what's quite nice is you get those exam questions that are like that. But here you can actually physically move the cards around. Okay. Now what you can then say is to them, I want you to make the smallest four-digit number and then they can say that they're physically just turning that number around to be two four five757.

[00:15:10]Do it that way. Um you could also say to them things like I want you to make the smallest even number. So then they might want to then make sure that then it's going to be an even number and so on.

[00:15:19]Okay? You could say, can you make the smallest twodigit number? So the smallest two-digit number would be 24 or the largest two-digit even number. And then you could just do it with the class where they've got their own cards, but they're just moving it around like that.

[00:15:33]Okay. So place value squaring numbers.

[00:15:36]So squaring numbers would be quite nice one where you could this get them to have the cards. You use the jacks and the queens again if you wanted to for 11 and 12 and you get them just to turn over a card two and you say square it and again this is quite a nice one if you're working one to one with a student and you could time them going through the whole deck of cards or they could work against each other and they just sort of they have got 20 cards each and then they just turn one over and then the quickest one to square it four wins the card. Okay, so the next one then would be 25. you can make it interesting and get the two students to both turn over a card and say, "I want you to square both of them and add them." So here we've got six and four. That's going to be 36 and 16. Add them together would be 52. So then you could get them to do that. So you know, you can use these in lots of different ways, but this one would be just like the addition and subtraction ones where they could be doing competitions like snap with each other. Okay, next one. Ven diagrams.

[00:16:31]Okay, you can get two circular rings. So perhaps like hula hoops or something like that or the smaller ones is a hoopla where you get those rings and you can get little cards that say square numbers, prime numbers, things like that and you get them to make vin diagrams.

[00:16:45]You get them to take some of the cards out and put them into the right places in the vin diagram. So that'd be quite a nice one. Averages. It could be a way that you perhaps do something like the median quite nicely. So again, I would take out the face cards here. So if we were to take five cards here, I want you to find the median of those cards. And then what they can actually do is physically move the cards and say, "Well, okay, the median is going to be three." You can, and you can do that with the students, and get them to do it that way. Or you can give them an even number, and that'd be quite nice, too.

[00:17:14]Then in terms of if they've got like six cards here, they'd have to put them in order and then say, well, it's in between three and four, so it's going to be 3.5. You can say then to what's the range? Well, it's going to be 7 take away two. That's going to be five.

[00:17:27]What's the mean? Well, then they're going to have to work that one out.

[00:17:30]What's the mode? It's three. But it can give them sets of data quite nicely.

[00:17:34]That's quite a nice one. Averages. And then even probability. That's probably the one that would jump out to mind a lot of the time whenever you say playing cards probability. So you can get them to put down so many numbers. Perhaps say to the class, I want you to take your little sets. Remember if there's if you've got a set between two, that would be perhaps 20 number cards each. You could even put in face cards for this one as well. Okay, so you could put in face cards and like you know jacks and queens and stuff like that there as well. So perhaps that and then you could give them questions such as what's the probability of getting a face card? So a jack, a queen or a king to be one fifth.

[00:18:09]You could then say what's the probability of getting a red card?

[00:18:12]That's going to be four fifths. What about a black card? One fifth. You can then say do you notice they add together to be one? Okay, you could give them over questions. For instance, what's the probability of picking a square number?

[00:18:23]And you can just give them questions based on the sets of cards, but it's just a means that they can actually see it. You could actually introduce cards, take cards away, simplify fractions with that as well. Okay, and that's it. So, there's some ideas in terms of how you can use playing cards whenever you're teaching maths. And I find it absolutely fantastic perhaps if you're working with a child at home. I've used them a lot because you I generally would have a set of playing cards sitting around whenever we were playing stuff like Jack change it and things like that. But here we've got, you know, additions. After dinner, you can just do some quick additions with your child. And then it gives them that opportunity to practice their additions or subtractions or multiplications, negative numbers, inequalities, fractions, place values, square numbers, vend diagrams, averages, probability, and so much more. So, I find playing cards really, really useful whenever I'm with my child at home and doing some maths at home with my child.

[00:19:10]If you're a home educator, I can see it be working in just the same way. You could even do it more formally with things like averages and things like that as well. But also if you're teaching in a classroom, I used to use these a lot in my classroom. Perhaps with these ones, the multiplications, I've done it with squaring numbers. It worked really well. It was just a sort of a a good thing to just get playing cards out and you can just throw them into beginning of lessons, end of lessons. You can even do a bit of competition with it as well. It's just a great thing to do. So, episode four today we have looked at in terms of lesson ideas, playing cards. I think they're fantastic. And thanks again to Sean for sharing this with me years ago in that teach Bristol. um you've you transformed some of our lessons. So, thanks very much. So, thank you everybody. All the best. Cheers.