The animals card game has been a huge hit with the kids (just make sure you stick to the original rules though!).

One of the side effects is that you end up learning a whole load of facts, because that’s how you get good at the game. Mind you in the animals game it’s not the most useful data the the World that you end up learning. But in 5th and 6th grades kids start learning about other countries, and although you can say to them “The US covers an area of 9,826,630 sq km”, it is pretty much useless to the kids as they have no frame of reference. Is that big? Is it small?

Enter the new countries card game!

Here you effortlessly learn the values of things like population size and GDP simply by playing the game. If your kids have already studied the categories in social studies class then gave this new game a go, it’s very addictive!

The data comes from the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia, so if you do spot any errors then please let me know!