Advent Calendar Maths Game

This Christmas we found ourselves in the awkward position of having three advent calendars and just two children to open them. The generous act of a mum at Wugs' preschool of giving each child an advent calendar meant that I had to decide whether to consume the chocolates in the third advent calendar myself or ask the children to take turns in having the chocolates in addition to the ones they had from their own calendars. Given the huge amount of chocolate that is generally consumed at Christmas, I thought I'd do something different with this advent calendar.

I decided to create a treasure hunt where the clues behind each door of the calendar are Maths puzzles, which lead to the next door and so on.

To make this game, I emptied all the chocolates from the advent calendar and put them in a bowl in the fridge. Then I measured the inner doors of the advent calendar and created 24 paper squares which would cover the picture that was already on the inner door. On the squares I wrote the puzzles. I used four different types of puzzle:
- subtraction (e.g. 5-3)
- addition (e.g. 10+3)
- counting (e.g. pictures of trees or snowballs)
- sequences (e.g. 62, 63, 64, 65, __?)

Once I wrote out all the puzzles on the paper squares, I cut out 24 small stickers and wrote the answers to the puzzles on them.  The only sticker that is not the answer to a puzzle is the first and I labelled this 100 as Wugs is interested in that number at the moment. I stuck the stickers over the numbers on the advent calendar doors and then starting with door 100, I stuck the puzzles to the inside of the calendar doors. The answer to the first puzzle is the number of the next door to be opened. For example, door 100 has the puzzle "Count the stars" followed by a drawing of 9 stars. The child then opens the door with 9 on it to reveal another puzzle and so on until all the doors are opened. The last door says a simple "well done!". If any doors remain closed then an error will have been made along the way and the child might wish to go back and double-check his/her answers.

Once I finished making the calendar, I added a chocolate to a couple of the doors, so that Wugs gets a surprise every now and then as he works through it. The second time he does it, a different door will have the chocolate and so on.

My Advent Calendar Maths Game was created for a four year old, with the puzzles ranging from very easy to difficult and I offered Wugs a hundred board and 20 stones to help him with the addition and subtraction puzzles.  The game could be adapted for any age range.

What we used:
- Advent calendar (with/without chocolates)
- White paper
- Stickers
- Pen
- A hundred board and 20 stones