Games with Dice and other Math Strategies

Penny on her blog was talking about Math Dice and various games you can play with them. We sorely need assistance with basic facts. Today we did two games with the dice. The first you can see here. We made our own game board. Andrew does NOT love games. He will play if he can do them by his terms. He had his 'characters' and we tore off a large sheet of butcher paper. (Hint on the paper: Buy a gigantic role from Costco.com. That way it gets delivered to your house and you don't have to haul it anywhere but in the door. )



I drew the board DURING play. You can obviously do this ANY way you want. I changed colors every 10 steps. That allowed for lots of different ways to get in math progress. I tried to stop at a multiple of ten as we made our way through the game board. Oh- Andrew loves stories so the entire 'game' was a story of his characters making there way from one place to the next. I could stretch out the journey by twisting the 'road.' First we would shake the dice and move that many spaces. I have 1-6 and 7-12 dice and I did addition only. We only added 2 numbers. I would then make the problem..i mean play...more complex by asking 'totals.' So if we were on space 16 and he had tossed a 24 we would add the two and then count to make sure we arrived at the appropriate square. We also would do...how many more spaces until we get to X which is sneaking in subtraction. That is why I put in the 'tree' picture. Before I drew those last 4 spaces after the dot I asked him now many to make 10 green squares. Clear as mud I suppose....just make up your own rules and stories based on your goals. I also let Andrew draw whatever he wanted AFTER the game. We used the game board the next day in a different way. Make up your own rules people. This is just the scaffolding.






Then we took the dice outside. We rolled it and went that many spaces on the sidewalk. I tried to make it a 'competitive game' but that just didn't work because I was too far away from Andrew to talk. So we did it...together. (In guided participation one might call that coordination.) We also counted evens or odds. If we were to go an even number of spaces we only counted evens...if odd..then odd. And if Andrew made a mistake we had to go back to where we started..tee hee. I only made him do that once and then scaffolded on the next procession- especially when counting evens.

So thanks Penny- for sparking this in my brain!