Math games that make learning fun!

Most of my students struggle with memorizing basic math facts! Knowing the facts automatically is the key to making more difficult math concepts easier to perform. So I've added a math fact practice activity to our daily schedule.

I teach the math lesson from the general education curriculum with modifications/accommodations, and my para runs these games at her center. The kids are loving it and they've seen some improvement in their timed math tests. The thing I love the most is that they beg to play them! They started the year avoiding even the most basic math activities but these games have their attention!

Here are a few of the games that we've played.......

I used those glass stones from the dollar tree, wrote numbers on them and placed them in my special jar, each student choose a handful and calculated the mean, median, mode, and range for their set of digits.

 They played for days and still ask if they can play this one when we have free time!

 Dice games! We've played several dice games but they really love the game of 1000, each player takes turns rolling two dice, multiplying the two digits, and adding that number to their total. The goal is to be the first player to make it to 1000. If they want to take the chance they can say (before they roll) that they want to play off the last roll and then they have to multiply their total for the roll by the total for the previous roll (of the player before them) if they get the answer correct they get all the points, if they miss they loose all those points! (Hope that make sense)

 Dominoes, play following the normal domino rules, but for each domino you lay down multiply each side and record your score, if you can't play a domino you get no points that round. First player to 1000 wins! (we played this today for the first time, you could have heard a pin drop! They were so focused and did a great job). I got the domino multiplication recording sheet from Making Learning Fun, I put mine in the wipe off pockets I got from Target this summer so we wouldn't need so many copies and could play over and over again!

and........

            

card games with these fun novelty shaped card games! I love finding new decks of cards in various shapes, the kids always love when I pull out a new deck! We've used them to practice mean, median, mode - I gave each student between 5 and 7 cards they figured the mean, median, and mode for their set of numbers. We've played multiplication war, deal the entire deck between two players, turn over 2 cards at a time, multiple - highest number wins all four cards. The player with the most cards at the end wins.

This week we used the cards to play greater than less than with partner. I made these foldables

from Dinah Zike's book, each player choose three cards, we added our own decimal card, the students had to arrange their three cards to try and create the biggest number possible, then show their partner and decide together whose number with the largest. The player with the biggest number gets a point, the person with the most points wins.

Those are a few of the games we've played so far! What do you do to make learning math facts fun? I'd love to hear your ideas!

Come back tomorrow for updates on what we are doing in reading! We've had some great fun there too, can't wait to share with you!!