A New Way to Use Your Speed! Cards

The card game Speed! comes with eight decks of playing cards. Each deck is color coded and uniquely numbered to help kids memorize the multiplication tables. For example, the red Two-Speed deck contains the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 20. The blue Seven-Speed deck contains the numbers 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, 63 and 70. The game was designed as a two-person racing game where the winner is the first person to get rid of all of his/her cards. (see video)

However, since the game is comprised of decks of cards, many games that can be played with a standard deck of cards can also be played with Speed! cards. This adds a new twist to many card games. One simple game that works very will with Speed! cards is a game called "Garbage".  The video below shows the game playing played with a standard deck of cards.

How to Play Garbage

The photo below shows the desired finished layout if the game was being played with the Three-Speed deck of cards.

What I like about the game Garbage is that it is a slower placed game that allows players more processing time. When playing this game and drawing a number 24 for example, players can say out loud "24 is 8 times 3", or "24 divided by 3 is 8". This helps kids to better link skip-counting to multiplication and division and provides a fun alternative game to play with the Speed! cards.