A few months back I decided to teach Honeybun (and therefore Sugarplum) the game of Slap Jacks as a way to work on her number relationships I couldn’t exactly remember the official rules to Slap Jack (I know, I know…I’ve been since informed many times there’s only really one rule) so I developed a hybrid of War and Slap Jacks.
I removed all the aces, queens and kings from a deck and split the remaining car among all players. Each round every player puts a card face up in the middle and if there is a Jack you try to be the first to slap it. Whoever slaps first gets all the cards. If there is no Jack, then whoever played the highest card gets the pile. If there are two cards that are the highest you have a “war” where each player (only those with the matching highest cards) put two cards face down and one face up and whoever gets the highest face up card of the war gets the entire pile of cards (you repeat this if cards match again…we’ve had as many as 3 wars on one round). When a player runs out of cards in their stack, they pick up the ones they’ve won each round and continue playing with those. Technically the game is over when one player has all the cards but it takes a long time to get there and we usually don’t make it that far.
Where the learning/math/number relationships part comes in is having Honeybun declare which card is highest. She did very well at this from the start and can now announce the highest almost as fast as I can. The game has also helped Sugarplum with her number recognition and when just her and I play I make her tell me the numbers and then I’ll announce the winner “Four is more than/higher than/bigger than two”.
While Slap Jack has become a favorite and most request game in our house, it’s also taken a bit of a strange turn. The girls got Disney playing cards in their stockings at Christmas, Sugarplum’s are Fairies and Honeybun’s are Princesses. This has resulted in Sugarplum wanting to play Slap Jack with her cards but not all the Jacks are the same so instead we’ve adapted the game to be “Slap Tinkerbell” (simply for the fact I don’t know any of the other fairies by name). Sugarplum now walks around begging to play “Slap Tinkerbell”!
Then just this morning she decided she wanted to play with Honeybun’s princess cards. This is how the actual conversation went down:
“Mommy, I want to play Slap Jack”
“Ok, do you want to play with your Fairy cards or regular cards?”
“I want Honeybun’s Princess cards.”
“Ok. Let’s take out all the letter cards.”
“Mommy, don’t take out Cinderella!”
“It’s ok, there’s more Cinderellas, we only need the number cards.”
“Who should we slap?”
“I don’t know. We should slap…Belle!”
“Ok, we’ll play Slap Belle this time.”
