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."