I have read and heard many times; if your child is interested in a certain thing, ie. videogame, cartoon, etc., gear their learning in that theme. Our four year old loves Minecraft and has now for most of his young life.

Those of you that may not be familiar with the videogame of Minecraft, the player generally starts out in a random place with nothing except a map, or at least that is the format we prefer the kids do. The player then has to collect resources such as wood, stone, coal, iron, and so on to survive and thrive in the game. The goal of the game can be whatever the player wants, whether they want to play for the ultimate prize of beating the Ender Dragon, or just explore the ever expanding world and biomes. The game has spawned past the digital world of the video game into LEGO sets, book series, and even homeschool curriculum.

It is because of his love for the game that when he started becoming interested in multiplication a couple months back, I came up with a decent idea. I would make him Minecraft themed times tables. It was a long, monotonous process of getting the same angle on each of the separate resource blocks to make them uniform images. I cut out the individual blocks from screenshots, making them with a transparent background so I could use the images for future projects as well. After the hard part, I tried to put the text box in relatively the same location in each and then put equations of one to 10 multiplied from one to 12.

The easy part really was just to resize each block so I could fit two to a sheet of paper. Once i had them fitting, it was just printing, cutting out, and laminating. I wasn’t entirely sure what we were going to do from there. We still are torn between hanging them on his bedroom wall or someplace else, that is the nice thing about laminating them (one of the best investments I’ve made). He currently likes to walk around the house using them as flashcards, quizzing us as he goes and having us quiz him. Eventually I plan on having a link up on here where you can download them for yourself if you are interested.

Download a compressed file of Minecraft multiplication blocks here:

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