It's the last day before Christmas vacation and I scheduled my groups to go to the library/media center to play math games on the computer. First of all let me say that my school has an outstanding library/media center and the two ladies who run it, Barb and Frieda, have been so helpful this year with information, scheduling and laminating of all the games and teaching aids that I make.
There are several websites that my students enjoyed today. My old favorite is mathplayground.com, but my students also enjoyed coolmath4kids.com and the math games on schooltimegames.com. The games they chose helped them practice skills they already had in an enjoyable setting. I like giving them a chance to explore and find fun math sites--maybe they will visit some of them at home too!
Friday, December 19, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Old Stand-by: Bingo
Some things never change and one of those things is that kids still like to play bingo every now and then in math class.
Last summer I picked up the reproducible book Math-O published by Mark Twain Media/Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company. It says it is for grades 5-8+. I paid $9.00 for it and I have gotten a lot of use out of it. It has generic bingo cards in the back that can be easily copied and laminated and it also has templates for making your own games. The first forty or so pages are how to use the generic games for different skills like order of operations, fractions, exponents, percents, and basic operations to name some. I have made my own games to include the skills of positive and negative integers, big numbers, and more fractions.
Today the eighth grade group did a lot of positive and negative integer problems and didn't do a single worksheet. We saved paper, strengthened listening skills and had a good time practicing adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative numbers. After one boy won both games in a row, I had him trade places with me to read the problems while I sat with the other kids and played. This gave me a chance to see how the other students were doing and give some instructive prompting, which helped review the rules for computation with integers. And the boy who took my place really enjoyed doing it!
At my last school we had a number of bingo games for the middle school grades that were purchased through the NASCO Company. Everything from pre-algebra bingo to mental math bingo. The students would always hope for and sometimes request a bingo day if we went for a long time without one. What a way to practice and learn!
Last summer I picked up the reproducible book Math-O published by Mark Twain Media/Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company. It says it is for grades 5-8+. I paid $9.00 for it and I have gotten a lot of use out of it. It has generic bingo cards in the back that can be easily copied and laminated and it also has templates for making your own games. The first forty or so pages are how to use the generic games for different skills like order of operations, fractions, exponents, percents, and basic operations to name some. I have made my own games to include the skills of positive and negative integers, big numbers, and more fractions.
Today the eighth grade group did a lot of positive and negative integer problems and didn't do a single worksheet. We saved paper, strengthened listening skills and had a good time practicing adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative numbers. After one boy won both games in a row, I had him trade places with me to read the problems while I sat with the other kids and played. This gave me a chance to see how the other students were doing and give some instructive prompting, which helped review the rules for computation with integers. And the boy who took my place really enjoyed doing it!
At my last school we had a number of bingo games for the middle school grades that were purchased through the NASCO Company. Everything from pre-algebra bingo to mental math bingo. The students would always hope for and sometimes request a bingo day if we went for a long time without one. What a way to practice and learn!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
A New Game
I thought I invented a new game today--but then when we played it, one of my students said, "This is just like playing 'monkey'." So maybe there is a game like it out there. I started by making a deck of cards that has matching sets of two cards. The skill that I am reinforcing with my grade 8 group is using the distributive property to multiply expressions like 4(3x +2) to get 12x +8. So I made sets of corresponding cards with the expressions on one side and on the other side: Distributive Property a(b+c)=ab +ac
We played with three players but it could be played with four. The cards are shuffled and then dealt out equally to players with the last four or so left face up on the table. Then everyone looks for matches in their hands and with the cards on the table and puts them down. When everyone is ready, each player passes three cards to the player on their left, and begins the process over again. Then everyone passes two cards to the player on their right. Players keep looking for matches. (At this point if there are four players, you pass two cards accross.) Then everyone puts one card face uyp in the center of the table. Keep doing this until all matches are made.
Students who are a bit slower will catch up at the end of the game. We all helped each other figure out the matches, rather than making it a cut-throat competition. As I think about it now, it seems more like an activity than a game, but the kids got some good practice from it and much prefer it to doing worksheets. But we did count up how many matches each player got, so maybe it was a competition!
Some students had a hard time doing the problems in their head, so used a white board to do them out on. I observed that they were becoming more proficient by the end of the game. I've promised them that we can play again another time this week. It seems like they were consistently looking to me to verify if they had made a correct match, but this is a relatively new skill, that ther regular math teacher has just introduced, and I hope to see them become more confident.
I was going to call my new game "Distributive Dash", but the students already refer to it as "Monkey."
We played with three players but it could be played with four. The cards are shuffled and then dealt out equally to players with the last four or so left face up on the table. Then everyone looks for matches in their hands and with the cards on the table and puts them down. When everyone is ready, each player passes three cards to the player on their left, and begins the process over again. Then everyone passes two cards to the player on their right. Players keep looking for matches. (At this point if there are four players, you pass two cards accross.) Then everyone puts one card face uyp in the center of the table. Keep doing this until all matches are made.
Students who are a bit slower will catch up at the end of the game. We all helped each other figure out the matches, rather than making it a cut-throat competition. As I think about it now, it seems more like an activity than a game, but the kids got some good practice from it and much prefer it to doing worksheets. But we did count up how many matches each player got, so maybe it was a competition!
Some students had a hard time doing the problems in their head, so used a white board to do them out on. I observed that they were becoming more proficient by the end of the game. I've promised them that we can play again another time this week. It seems like they were consistently looking to me to verify if they had made a correct match, but this is a relatively new skill, that ther regular math teacher has just introduced, and I hope to see them become more confident.
I was going to call my new game "Distributive Dash", but the students already refer to it as "Monkey."
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