Learning Greater Than Less Than with Playing Cards

Learning greater than less than with playing cards builds number sense and math skills with a hands-on activity for kindergarten and early elementary age kids.

Math skills are crucial to school success – and real world adulting let’s be honest. Helping even preschoolers develop a love for learning numbers and math skills builds their future math success.

We started with at home learning activities for kids in our house when my kiddos were babies. As they grew it was something they enjoyed as their skills grew. This activity is one that we used in our preschool at home lessons and also as my kids grew to do kindergarten and first grade math.

It works as a great review activity for school age kids too. So simple to set up. All you need are playing cards and a yard stick. (If you only have a ruler or tape measure those work too.)

Hands-On Math: Learning Greater Than Less Than with Playing Cards

To start, pull out the face cards and number them (Jack = 11, Queen = 12, King = 13, Ace = 14), or leave them out of the deck if you prefer.

Next, shuffle the playing cards and divide them into two piles. One will be for you and one will be for your child.

Then, your child draws a card and you draw a card. Lay the cards side by side.

The goal is for your child to choose which card (number) is greater than the other. They can count the images on the cards to compare. Whoever laid the greater card wins both cards.

If your child needs help visualizing which number is larger, use a yard stick.

To help see which number comes after the other, we actually slid the cards under their respective numbers on the yard stick. This helped my child see that the numbers to the right were bigger as we counted up.

This was a fun visual way to play learning greater than less than.

We switched up the learning greater than less than game for the second round and played less than.

The lesser card was the winning card each time. Use the terms bigger and smaller if that helps your child with learning greater than less than with playing cards.

To finish, we each counted all our cards. Whomever had the most (greater) amount of cards won. More hands-on number and math skills for learning greater than less than!

More School age learning activities to do at home can be found here.

Even the preschool learning activities can be great for kindergarten kids.

**Share this activity on Pinterest by pinning the image below.**

For more math activities during stay at home time, check out ABC Mouse.

More math learning during your time at home with the kids:

Free educational resources from Tried and True Blog.

Educational resources for kids from New York Family.

Khan Academy has math resources on Youtube and online.

What are your favorite math learning games for teaching kids at home? Share them in the comments!

Enjoy your time at home!