Clumsy Thief Junior is a card game that will teach your kids number pairs that sum to 10. It’s a clever game that will get your kids to learn math addition facts while having a great time playing with family and friends.
In kindergarten, your kids are introduced to math addition facts. One of the most important ones they will learn is sums of 10 or two numbers that add to 10. Then by 1st grade, your kids are expected to master the addition facts to 10 and use them in more complex problems.
Memorizing the addition facts and doing countless worksheets can be boring for kids. But you want your kids to get out of the habit of counting with their fingers.
Clumsy Thief Junior is an excellent way for your children to practice addition facts while having lots of fun. Just like the Tenzi dice game, your kids will be doing math mentally without even realizing it.
How to Play Clumsy Thief Junior
Clumsy Thief Junior is a simple card game, but it’s so well designed that it has won The Parents’ Choice Foundation Award to the Tillywig Toy Awards, Academics’ Choice Award, and many more.
The illustrations on the cards are so adorable. The food cards have colorful vegetables and fruits on them. The thief is depicted as a cute raccoon who tends to make a mess in the process of stealing the produce.
The card deck comes with food cards, thief cards, and trap cards. The food cards are the ones you will need to add to 10. The thief cards have the ability to steal any food card deck from any player. And the trap cards give you the ability to steal the food card decks that have been previously stolen by a thief.
I want to note that each pair of cards that add up to 10 has matching pictures on them. This was wonderful for my daughter who is new to mental math and couldn’t quite play the game yet without counting with her fingers. She picked up the number pairs quickly and was so proud when she would recognize that she needed a 1 for the 9 cards, 4 for the 6 cards, etc.
Clumsy Thief Junior Rules
To start off the game, each player is given 7 cards. Each player needs put down as many number pairs that add up to 10 as possible in separate stacks in front of them.
Then as soon as everyone is done, you yell “GO!” Players now can steal the stacks from each other and put the stolen stacks in front of them. This is done in 3 ways:
- If you have a food card in your hand that can add up to 10 with the number on the top card of the stack.
- If you have a thief card. You can also place thief card on top of another thief card to steal the stack.
- If you have a trap card, you can steal any stacks that have a thief card on the top. However, if the stack already has a trap card as the top card, you cannot touch that stack.
This part of the game is very fast-paced and stacks can change hands very quickly. You might find that one person who seemed to be the clear winner all of a sudden loses most of his or her stacks to the other players.
Then the game continues with each player getting more cards from the center pile if they have less than 5 cards in their hands, and restarting the process of making stacks with the cards in their hands. The game ends when the center pile runs out of cards. The player with the most cards wins!
It’s great to watch my kids think about the game strategically. What number should they put as the top card of the stack? Should they use their thief cards now or wait another turn? Even though my son, who is about to go into 2nd grade, found the math part of the game easy, he was intrigued about how he could prevent others from stealing his stacks.
By the 3rd time we play Clumsy Thief Junior, my daughter, who is entering kindergarten, had already memorized most of the number pairs that sum to 10. I am confident that as we continue to play Clumsy Thief Junior, she will learn her math addition facts that sum to 10 very well.
Final Thoughts on Clumsy Thief Junior
We are a huge fan of gameschooling, and especially with my daughter’s personality, using fun games to learn math makes homeschooling a lot easier.
Clumsy Thief Junior certainly does the job well of getting the kids excited about mastering number pairs that add to 10. It’s exciting to see how many stacks you can make with the cards in your hand, and even more exciting to steal cards from another player.
Clumsy Thief Junior is included in the Kindergarten curriculum kit on Timberdoodle. Check out the whole curriculum to see what other fun games can pique your children’s interest in learning.
If you like games like Clumsy Thief Junior, make sure you check out my reviews for:
I love when games also help encourage learning in a fun way.
Same, why not have fun while learning! 😀
Wow, what a fantastic way to really embed those addition facts into memory!