My friend Lisa could attest to the fact that I was extremely math phobic as a kid. It just wasn’t my thing. My mother was great on the early hands-on math lessons…fractions were taught with Hersey’s chocolate bars. Leave it to her to find a fun connection to chocolate! But I never could get that chocolate rush when doing factors or geometry…

If this sounds remotely familiar–I have a game that makes practicing your math skills fun….really. Double Shutter is an updated version of an old pub game called Shut the Box. Here the game comes with two rows of numbered tiles. Roll the dice and then flip down the numbers you come up with…now you can play by adding, multiplying, dividing, or subtracting the numbers on the dice. I prefer the addition level. The object is to be the first one to flip down all the tiles. From Blue Orange Games (there are two versions — a jr. version has only one row of numbers).