Speed! - Patterns in the Cards - Multiples

This is the second 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.

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

Last week we used Two Speed as the base deck of cards and placed corresponding numbers from Five Speed on top. The resulting pattern was a column. If you tried the additional activities of replacing the Two Speed base deck with Three Speed or Six Speed you should have also seen columns.

What do you think will happen if the base deck is a multiple of the top deck? For example, if Four Speed is the Base Deck and Two Speed is the top deck. (Four is a multiple of Two).

First lay Four Speed, the base deck out like this.

- Now get out Two Speed and find the cards the two decks have in common (4, 8, 12, 16 and 20). If Two Speed was extended it would also conatin the common cards 24, 28, 32, 36 and 40.
- Lay the common cards from Two Speed on top of the corresponding Four Speed cards.

All the cards are covered.

If Four Speed is extended up to 160 and corresponding Two Speed cards are placed on top all the cards are covered and your cards should look like the picture above.

Now try other multiples.
Base Deck       Top Deck
Eight Speed        Four Speed
Six Speed           Three Speed
Nine Speed         Three Speed