Squares Game

We love to play games in our homeschool, and sometimes the simplest of games are the most fun.

Squares is a game that can be played anywhere you have paper and a pencil. Really, it could even be played in the dirt with rocks and a stick! All you need is to set a square dot grid, as below, making it as large or small as you’d like. Then, all you do is take turns drawing horizontal or vertical lines from one point to the other (not diagonals!) . The first person to close a square claims the space by dropping their first initial in the square. You do not need to have drawn all the lines around the square to claim it, just be the person to close off the square.

Another fun way to use this game is to practice multiplication facts. I downloaded the gameboard below from Games 4 Gains, slipped it into a page protector (alternatively you could laminate), used two dry erase markers and two dice. The player roles the dice and multiplies the two together. Then a line is drawn on one of the sides of the correct answer. The last person to close the box, gets the box, and we coloured the number with our marker. We also created one where we role the dice twice and multiply those numbers together so we could work on the top end of the multiplication tables too. I made a new, larger board for that game.

Because of the size of Multiplication Squares, it is a game that lasts several days, played in small spurts of time. It is nice to come back to it for a bit of a fun each day!