War

Early Years/Primary/Junior (Age 3 – 12)

Curriculum Goal

Kindergarten: Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour

Demonstrate an understanding of numbers, using concrete materials to explore and investigate counting, quantity, and number relationships (#15).

Primary: Number Sense

Recall and demonstrate addition facts for numbers up to 10, and related subtraction facts.

Junior: Number Sense

Recall and demonstrate multiplication facts from 0 × 0 to 12 × 12, and related division facts.

Two to four students and the teacher will be sitting on the carpet in a circle or on a video conference chat.
Students should have previous experience with number magnitude (early years) or adding and subtracting (primary).

In-person version

One standard 52-card deck, number inclusion dependent on students’ level: i.e., A – 10 (early years) or A – 13 (primary)

Online version

Early Years:

Deal out entire deck of cards equally among students.
Players simultaneously turn over the top card of their deck.
The player with the highest card takes all played cards and places them at the bottom of their deck.
When two players turn over the same highest number, a war is launched – each player puts down two more cards, face down, then turns up a third card. The person with the highest card takes all the cards in that round.
The game ends when one player has all the cards.

Player with the smaller number wins each round.
Addition War, Subtraction War, Multiplication War, etc. Players turn up two cards each round. Player with the largest sum (or difference, or product) takes all.
Face cards can count as 11, 12, 13.