08 Jul 2005 - 04:57

a wonderful game

AnneDwyer has a wonderful math game for kids that she wrote about on her wiki page.

The kids pick the number of digits (we usually start with 5). They put 5 dashes on their paper. I turn over 5 cards in a deck one by one. They have to decide where to put the numbers. Then each kid reads their number to me while I put it on the white board. The kids with the highest number wins.

For some reason, they love this game. On the next round, we go up one digit. Today, we went all the way up to 100 million.

It's a great game.

• They gain familiarity with large numbers. They get a lot of practice with reading large numbers out loud and hearing large numbers read out loud while it is being written on the board.

• They have to use strategy. In some games, we have a lot of high numbers at first which every kid puts in the same place. Then, they winner is the determined by the numbers in the ones and tens place. Conversely, sometimes we have a lot of low numbers in the beginning. Then the winner is determined by the highest digits. Much more interesting is when we have medium and low cards. Then, they have to do a lot more thinking about where the cards go.

• There are very concrete results from this game that allow us to explore numbers even further. In one game, 5 out of 8 kids had the same highest number. So we talk about why and when does this happen? In one game, we had one winner that was a lot higher than anyone else. When does this happen?

We have a gang of kids that run semi-wild in our neighborhood in the summer. They are very mixed in age (ranging from 7 through 11). I have thought about corralling the whole lot of them and bringing them in to teach them all some math together; it would do them all some good to work on it over the summer, and Ben would enjoy his math sessions more if he shared them. I'm a little stumped, though, about how to teach a wide range of ages and interest levels simultaneously.

I'd love to collect some more math games that are as simple and elegant as this one is, especially games that might appeal to a broad range of ages, and (like this one) start a math session off on the right foot.

Back to main page.

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I think you should get the book Anne recommended--remember, it's the one that's been in print forever.

This game is so great, I may go ahead and get it myself.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2005

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Games for Math by Peggy Kaye

You can look inside the book at Amazon.

Peggy Kaye also has a book called Games for Reading.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2005

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Games for Writing by Peggy Kaye

Games for Learning: Ten Minutes a Day to Help Your Child Do Well in School/from Kindergarten to Third Grade

fyi

I'm a believer in the 10-minutes-a-day idea.

It's amazing what you can get done in 10 minutes a day when you spend 10 minutes every day doing the same thing.

Especially with children's learning.

I've become more and more impatient with the constructivist emphasis on endless 'challenge' problems and huge, long 'project' assignments the parents will have to do.

All of this stuff is unpleasant and unhappy-making (now there's a turn of phrase!) and the kids don't need it to learn well.

My suspicion is that kids learn more through having many short, efficient assignments that they do every single day than they do through struggling with one big, fat challenge that they work on for a week.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2005

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Agreed. I think that constructivism has given math activities a bad name,

-- CarolynJohnston - 08 Jul 2005

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That is part of the Kumon mystery, which isn't really a mystery at all. The child is supposed to do a 15-20 minute worksheet everyday and then meet once a week for an hour somewhere. They don't move on to the next skill until they've mastered what they're presently doing.

-- SusanS - 08 Jul 2005

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That's a perfect example.

Fifteen minutes a day, over and out.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2005