Making Maths Meaningful: Creative Ways to Develop Fluency and Understanding Through Games

Do you worry that your child is falling behind in maths and losing confidence with every lesson? Does your child freeze up at the sight of a word problem or a times table question? Have gaps in their early understanding made more advanced maths—like fractions or division—feel overwhelming?

If any of those questions felt familiar, you're not alone—and your child isn’t the only one. Many children struggle with maths at some point during primary school, especially if they’ve missed key learning or lost confidence along the way.

That’s where I come in.

One of the best things about tutoring is being able to make maths fun, practical, and truly meaningful for children. Maths isn't just about worksheets and written methods—it's about problem solving, pattern spotting, and confidence-building. One of my favourite ways to support this is through using hands-on resources that bring maths to life and develop a deep understanding and fluency through games.

I regularly use manipulatives like Numicon, place value counters, bead strings, dice, and even a simple pack of playing cards to help children develop a really strong understanding of key concepts and fluency 'at their fingers tips' in maths skills. These resources are brilliant for exploring number sense, place value and calculation strategies in a visual and tactile way.

For example:

• Numicon helps children see number patterns and relationships, which is especially useful for addition and subtraction, but can also be used to see how repeatedly adding a number is the same as multiplication. Conversely, being able to calculate how many 7s are in 42 (and other multiplication and division facts) can be made much more visual for students using Numicon. If you don't have Numicon at home, print out the pictures or use websites like https://mathsbot.com/manipulatives/numberFrames to support your child's understanding of number. These are also a great way of seeing and understanding odd and even numbers - another concept that children often don't fully understand, especially with larger numbers. You can explore 'always true, sometimes true or never true' statements like 'Does adding two odd numbers always make an even number?' and asking children to 'prove it'.

  
  

• Place value counters support understanding of number composition (and how they can be partitioned or broken down), laying the groundwork for written methods like column addition and subtraction. Use the different coloured counters to represent ones, tens, hundreds, thousands and compare the value of each digit, or add them together starting with the ones.

  
  

• Bead strings, buttons and objects for counting are fantastic for developing fluency in number bonds and mental maths strategies. Get out the penne pasta, crafting jewels or some acorns and develop their fluency in counting, adding, subtracting, grouping, fractions... the list is endless!

  
  

• Dice and playing cards are perfect for quick-fire games that practise key facts like times tables or number comparisons—without it ever feeling like a test! One of my students' favourites is called The Winner Takes All. Here's how to play:

  1) Give each player the same number of objects (counters, beads, pasta...).

  2) Take it in turns to roll two dice and multiply them together. The player with the highest answer in each round wins an object from the others.

  3) Repeat until one player has all the objects/the most objects within 5 minutes etc.

  Make it harder: use 10, 12 pr 20 sided dice

  Make it easier: practise adding or subtracting instead

  
  

Using these practical resources helps children move from concrete understanding to more abstract thinking, so when they do move on to written methods, they actually understand why the method works—not just how to do it.

Most importantly, games and resources like these connect maths to real-life situations. Once a child understands place value and number relationships, they can apply that knowledge to work out how much change they should get from a £5 note, or how to scale up a recipe when baking. It becomes meaningful, and that’s when real confidence starts to grow.

When children enjoy learning, they learn more deeply—and seeing them apply their maths skills with pride in everyday life is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Get in touch if your child would benefit from some tuition using hands-on resources like some of the ones I have mentioned above.

Making maths fun using fortune tellers to practise number bonds to 100

Using whiteboards to make problem solving more tactile and reduces the pressure of getting it right

Using clocks with mechanical hands to practise reading the time

Numicon to develop an understanding of multiplication and division

Using gems as counters to calculate factors of different numbers

Using play dough to develop accuracy in measuring

Using place value counters when adding and subtracting

Using cards as an open ended activity to find different ways of reaching 852 and developing an under

Using play dough and spaghetti to learn the properties of 3D shapes

Using playdough to represent different fractions

Using a bead string to help us learn the 7 times table

Using dominoes to represent and generate fractions and using pom poms to calculate the given fractio