A Teacher's Ruminations

Slicing every day in March!! In a recent blog post,  The Teacher Next Door  described how to play 8 different math games using dice. Today I taught my students the simplest of the 8 games. Most of the games have one or two variations that make them more challenging. Once the kids have the basic game down, they'll probably want to change things up a bit and the variations will help them do that. Most of the games, if not all, only require dice, paper and pencil. or individual whiteboards and white board markers. Today we played Build It Big or Build it Small, a game where you had to either build the largest or the smallest number. I played against the class. First, you decide if you are playing with two, three, four or more place values and draw that number of dashes on your paper or whiteboard. Then, you throw the die once and write the number you roll on either of the dashes. Once you write down a number you can't change it. We played a few rounds and kept ...