Speed! - Patterns in the Cards - Columns

This is the first post in an extension of the Speed! Patterns in the Cards posts. - I created the fun card game Speed! to teach multiplication. It uses skip counting to teach children to multiply and how to multiply faster. The series of Patterns in the Cards blog posts are meant to show some activities that can aid in number sense development using the Speed! cards. I plan to go through several combinations of Speed! card decks with you searching for patterns. - I hope you are ready to join me on this fun, visual math journey.


Cool patterns become visible when two decks of Speed! cards are placed one on top of the other matching numbers.

Let's begin with Two Speed. Lay your cards out like this.

- Now get out Five Speed and find the cards the two decks have in common (10 and 20).
- Lay the common cards from Five Speed on top of the corresponding Two Speed cards.

- Five Speed includes the numbers 30, 40 and 50. These cards are also in the extended Two Speed pattern. Continue the pattern by placing Five Speed cards on top of Two Speed cards.
- An extended Five Speed pattern (counting by 5's) contains the numbers 60, 70 and 80 which are also in the extended Two Speed pattern (counting by 2's). Place the Five Speed cards on top of the corresponding Two Speed cards.

Look what happens! The resulting pattern is clearly a column.

Now repeat the activity using Three Speed, Six Speed or another deck as the base instead of Two Speed. Place the Five Speed cards on top of the corresponding numbers. What does your pattern look like?