The site coordinator for our JustMATH programs offers some thoughts on building math skills through games:
If you ask a student who isn’t engaged in math (and even some who are) to fill in a worksheet, you will often get a response of “ugh.” However, when you can play a game to reinforce the same concepts, students practice their skills while having fun.
Multi-digit Division
Fourth graders this year were practicing multi-digit by one-digit division, so we pulled out 5 dice to create a game.
1. Roll the four 10 sided-dice – put them in any order to make the dividend (5891)
2. Roll the fifth dice to become the divisor (8)
Several students played together–they would each do their division problem and the one with the largest quotient would win. They played this over and over. Sometimes we would take a break and guess which answer would be bigger before we even did the problem. One interesting observation is that students often think the problems on a worksheet are “magic” and don’t understand that you can take any number and divide it by another number – you just might get a remainder.
Addition and Subtraction
One student was struggling with her addition and subtraction facts, but when we played “21” she could add and subtract to 21 faster than the tutor could.
- Deal each person 2 cards face down.
2. The player views their own cards.
3. The dealer then asks each person if they would like another card, until the person says “no”.
4. The play progresses until all players have a chance to get as many cards as they want.
5. Everyone turns over their cards and the one closest to “21” without going over, wins.
Word Problems
Students often struggle with word problems such as the following:
If Jane has a bag of 24 pieces of candy to share with three friends, how many pieces do Jane and her friends each get?
Try making up word problems for each other and make sure you use a lot of vocabulary. If students become better at making up word problems, they will become better at solving them.