One of the things I love to use for our living math lessons is games. I don’t know about your children, but mine can pick up skills they never knew they had simply by playing a game. When I taught my eldest how to multiply one of the things I started with was this very simple game called Ka-Ching! Instead of using the word “multiply” though I used the words “groups of”. My son had so much fun playing this game he had absolutely no idea he was learning a valuable math skill!
How We Use It:
When we’re having a living math day, I pull this game out and challenge my son to a round or two. It’s a very fast paced game all about buying and selling stocks. It’s really addictive to play as well!
Basically you set a game board up with the cards by laying them out in a 7×5 grid. Each person is given a certain amount of money {provided in the game} to buy stocks with. I give out money a little differently than the game indicates. I hand out one $10, one $5, one $2, & three $1’s to get the game rolling. Each player also gets one bonus card which can be paired, at any time, with any stock card from the grid. {We generally save it until the end!}
From there, on each turn a person can collect a card from the grid or they can sell stocks, the choice is theirs. The idea is to buy low and sell high. For instance, if you purchase a $3 card and a $6 card you’ve spent a mere $9, but when you sell them you get $3 x $6 for a grand total of $18!
You can see where this is going right? I didn’t explain this strategy to my child when we started playing the game. We simply played. I prefer to let them find their own strategies as they go along, it’s more likely to stick with them. That’s exactly what happened with this game! It took a few rounds of plays but he very quickly realized he needed the higher value cards in order to beat Mom at the end.
What I love:
- I love the simplicity of this game. It didn’t take us an hour or a week to figure out the instructions. It was pretty open and go!
- I love that this is made by Gamewright. Seriously! They sell some amazing, but quick, fun games!
- I love that the cards are reasonably durable considering I play this with my kids.
- I love the color! For anyone who’s visual it’s really eye popping to play, not to mention the pictures of the presidents on the money crack us all up.
- The price. If purchased in the US, this game is fairly reasonably priced at a meager $9.89 + shipping from Amazon.
What I don’t like:
When sold overseas I find the price of this game a bit much. I bought it at a local shop in Tasmania for $20. At the same time, the game is fun, educational, and thus makes it worth what I paid.
Other than that I really can’t complain about this game!
Bottom Line:
We love this highly fun, extremely addictive, amazingly educational game. You really have got to try it for yourself!

Math On The Level
The curriculum is composed of 7 main volumes. Four of the volumes cover the bulk of the actual material, with the remaining three volumes containing supporting and record-keeping resources. The four main books cover Operations, Money & Decimals, Geometry & Measurements, and Fractions. In the supporting materials, Carlita and John have developed various charts and tracking tools to help you keep track of what each child has learned, what they’re still reviewing, and what topic to introduce next. The back-bone of MOTL is the 5-a-day review. Rather than learning a concept only to forget it a few weeks later, the 5-a-day review and tracking system provides a way to keep concepts alive.
What I Love -
What I Don’t Love -










After using this material for about one semester, I do have some evaluations. If there were one or two unifying spines holding this curriculum together, I think Living Math would be more coherent. Because I don’t have the benefit of a strong math history foundation myself, I have to rely on the scattered chapters to do the teaching. In other words, I can’t draw up information from my own memory to teach about Pythagoras or Galileo. If the particular lesson relies on an out of print book that I don’t have, the lesson is weakened. Along those same lines, this curriculum works best for those who have access to a well stocked library. Purchasing all of the books listed is impossible, not just because of exorbitant cost but because many of the books are out of print.