T I love this Jelly Bean game, so much fun and it teaches maths with no need for anything that you might not have other than jelly beans. Jelly bean Jumble Maths Game is brought to you by Sara-Jayne from Keep Up with the Jones family. Sara-Jayne is a fellow mum to boys, she has three under six and is a Junior School Teacher. This post is part of our learning with manipulatives series.

Today’s game is a maths one, that we play quite often as children without realising that we’re learning. As it’s after Easter we’ve got quite a few jelly beans in the house but you can use any snack you’d like.
Maths Jelly Bean Game

To play our Jellybean Jumble Maths Game, you will need:
Little Sweet Bags (UK Link) or Cups (UK Link)
Jellybeans
A Price List
Customers
It takes minutes to set up. Simply draw and price your snacks as a little menu and distribute a mixture of the snacks in each bag. You can do this randomly or strategically – for example, if you’re trying to teach number bonds.

So, the menu sets out the cost of each item and then in each little bag or cup is a combination of the menu items. There are a few ways to play this and differentiate depending on the age and ability of your little ones. Mine are 4 and 6, and as I want them to play together, we’ve taken a very simple approach and are adding the jellybeans up.

The boys take it in turns to bring a customer to the shop. We’ve used our Yoshi today. They select a little bag of beans and take them to the checkout person. Upon emptying the bag, the beans are placed against the menu and then the totals are added.

If the total is correct, the player wins the bag of beans!
Extensions to the game are easy – if you have coins around the house, you can play with these to reinforce the real-world connection, but the maths alone can be fun.

Once the bags are all sold, your little shopkeeper can restock their shelves by creating a bag worth a specific price – and see if they can assemble more than one possible jellybean combination for a particular price.
There are so many ways to play – and they can be as challenging as necessary, whilst still having fun. How cool is it to have a jelly bean game.

- How Many Cows on the Farm Counting Game from Life Over C’s
- Gold Fish Measurement Math Game from Learning 2 Walk
- Teach Preschoolers Fractions from Preschool Powol Packets
- Feed The Penguin from Adventures of Adam
- Jelly Bean Maths Game from Mum in the Madhouse
- How Many Goldfish in the Bowl Game from Play & Learn Everyday
- Cheerios Number Tracing from Schooling a Monkey
- Fish Cracker Color Patterns from The Kindergarten Connection

I love it! Games that teach without anyone realising are the best ones:-)
Thank you for having us over to play again – it’s been brilliant fun as usual – and we’ve spent quite of a bit of time today playing with the jellybean game ourselves!
Such a great idea and a fantastic interactive way to teach math. I have always been a bit worried about teaching math at home as I didn’t want to teach them wrong!
I have a feeling that the jelly beans wouldn’t last very long here lol
Mine think of the jellybeans are rabbit poop [how lovely] after watching, “Hop” a couple of years ago at Eastertime….
Great way to create a love of maths without even realising they’re doing anything educational!
Educational and then tasty – great idea
A great little game that I will be playing with my Daughter. Thanks for the inspiration – I love your background board x
What a great but simple idea for a game, I will definitely be trying this with my little ones (and it’s called Jelly Bean, just like my Jelly Bean) x
Always good to play a game which is both fun and educational.
My eldest would be too busy eating the sweets to play 😉 we’re lucky that she’s good at maths anyhow!
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This looks like such a fun game! The kids would love buying jelly beans 🙂
This is a great idea. My daughter would love playing this. Thank you for sharing.
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