Tour the Planets

What You Need:

• White paper
• Markers
• Deck of cards with the face cards (jacks, queens, and kings) removed
• Pencil

What You Do:

Create The Scoresheet:

- Each player makes her own coloring sheet on a vertical piece of white paper. In the center of the page, draw the outline of a sun with a black marker.

- Draw 9 concentric rings around the sun, one ring per planet or moon in our solar system. Make a black outline drawing of each planet or moon on it's orbital line. They can be drawn as creatively as you like!

- Next to each drawing, write the corresponding initial. The initials in order around the sun should be: M, V, E, M, J, S, U, N, P.

-Have your child shuffle the deck and place it face down.

Play The Game:

1. Ask your child to shuffle the deck and place it face down. For this game aces= 1.
2. Each player takes 2 cards at a time. They can choose to use any math system including addition, subtraction, or multiplication to combine the two cards they choose, trying to end up with any number between 1 and 9.
3. If the answer is between 1 and 9, the player gets to color in the corresponding planet in order of their distance from the sun. For example, if a player's number is 5, they would color in Jupiter, because it's the 5th planet from the sun.
4. Players can only color in the planets if their math is correct, they can name the planet, and the planet has not been colored in yet by another player.
5. When all the planets have been named, each player should count the number of planets they have colored and whoever has colored the most planets is the winner!