A Partners of Ten Game All Elementary Students Will Love

As elementary teachers, we all know how important partners of ten are for our students as a foundation for solving more complex math algorithms in the future.

So today I wanted to share a partners of ten game my students of ALL ages have loved…it’s been such an easy way to solidify those crucial pairs.

Why do I say all ages?

Over the years, I’ve watched students in my 4th and 5th grade classes struggle to remember various partners of ten as they solved more complex algorithms. Without having those pairs memorized, many of the students were not able to compute with ease.

In my role as math coach now, I’ve been fortunate to learn new ways to tackle this area for all of our students.

And one of my favorite ways to do so is with a simple game.

Years ago, our school had an excellent professional development session from Bill Atwood, an education consultant who shared many engaging strategies and games that our students have LOVED for years.

And one of our absolute favorite games is Cover Ten!

Bill has a great video explaining all about Cover Ten if you’d like to see the directions in action here: Cover Ten Card Game

My students play a slightly modified version of this game and I’m sharing those steps here…

Partners of Ten Game

Game: Cover Ten

Players: students can play as partners or independently

Materials Needed: a deck of cards with the Kings, Jacks, and Joker removed. All number cards will be used, as well as Queens (for zero) and Aces (for ones).

Directions: Set up three rows of cards with four cards in each row.

(I used a deck that has black and white cards so you can easily see the cards I’m covering as we go through the steps below)

Keep the remainder of the deck facedown. The deck can also be held in the player’s hand if the student is playing independently.

Now students will work to cover partners of ten. In this first example, we can cover the 6 and 4:

The 6 and 4 will be covered with two cards taken from the facedown deck:

And now the student can look for more partners of ten, such as 7 and 3:

Since the Queen represents zero, the Queen and 10 can be covered for 0 + 10 in this example:

And the Ace represents 1, so it can be covered along with either one of the nines available for 9 + 1:

Students will continue covering partners for ten until all cards have been used.

And here is the beauty of this partners of ten game:

As students become more comfortable finding those pairs, they start to play faster…they LOVE this! The goal becomes to get rid of the cards in their hand quickly (while they are really memorizing all those partners of ten with automaticity).

I especially love how this helps upper-elementary students remember the pairs with a game that doesn’t feel too young.

These are the rainbow playing cards I used for this partners of ten game. I love using this set on a document camera because the cards show up really nicely as we are going over the rules for math games.

(My students use regular playing cards however, nothing fancy like this!)

I also bought these glow in the dark playing cards recently for the glow day we have each Halloween. And oh my goodness, these were a HIT!! They were so bright in the blacklight and my students in all grades played Cover Ten with delight!

I hope your students enjoy this partners of ten game as much as my students have over the years!

Please sure to check out the other games and activities on Bill Atwood’s YouTube channel…we use so many of these and our students love them all!