Another Deck:

If you have an UNO deck or another numbered deck available, use it. That way children won't need to remember that aces count as ones. Use cards 1-9 only.

Fives Go Fish:

Also keep the 10 cards in the deck. This variation is the same as Tens Go Fish, except players try to make pairs with a difference of five. For example, 8 and 3 are a pair, because 8 - 3 = 5. The cards 5 and 10 are a pair because 10 - 5 = 5.

Big Tens Go Fish:

Play is the same as Tens Go Fish, except players can lay down groups of cards of any size that add to ten. For example, if a player has a 5, 3, and 2 in their hand, they can lay these three cards down, since 5 + 3 + 2 = 10. Pairs are also still allowed. Once the pond is empty, play continues until all players in a row have been unable to lay down a group. Unlike Tens Go Fish, players may finish the game with cards in their hands. A player's score is the number of cards they laid down minus the number of cards in their hand. High score wins.

Addition Intuition:

Give your child 10 tokens and ask them to write down any pairs of numbers they can find that fill in the blanks __ + __ = 10. After letting them work, show that each pair can be found by starting with a pile of 10 tokens, and moving 1 at a time to a second pile. Ask them why the total number of tokens doesn't change when moving a token from one pile to the other.

Demonstrate that addition is commutative (this means it doesn't matter what order you add things together in, you'll get the same answer either way). After recording 9 + 1, 8 + 2, 7 + 3, and 6 + 4, each pile has 5 tokens, representing 5 + 5. Ask if there are more pairs. Then move a token to get a pile of 4 and 6. 6 + 4 = 10 is already listed, and now kids can see that 4 + 6 also equals 10. Similarly, 7 + 3 and 3 + 7 also equal the same amount, 8 + 2 = 2 + 8, and 9 + 1 = 1 + 9.

Finally, ask what addition fact is represented by a single pile of 10. Help them identify that when one pile has 10 tokens, the other has 0, so 10 + 0 = 10 and 0 + 10 = 10 can also be added to the list. (Unless you have a special deck, however, these won't be useful in Tens Go Fish!)