Wednesday, October 24, 2012

More math fun!

 
If you’re like me then you’re always looking for ways to fun up a math lesson for your kids. Unfortunately, students often feel intimidated or overwhelmed with challenging math concepts. It’s not uncommon for my students to zone out, get distracted, or even shut down completely during math and the funny thing is that I was the exact same way with math when I was growing up. I loathed sitting in math class and I dreaded being called on for fear of having the wrong answer. These days, it’s one of my absolute favorite subjects to teach because unlike so many other subjects, there are definitive answers. There’s something to be said for the formulaic, systematic, black and white side of life. So many things need interpretation and are subjective that it’s nice to teach with the left-brain throughout the day. I digress.

Anyway, so I’m constantly perusing Pinterest and other wonderful blogs for ways to bring life and fun into math and here are a couple of the things I’ve found that I’ve been using for task board just to reinforce some of the more difficult concepts we’ve been learning:

Math Jenga  

I’m sure most of you have played Jenga in day and guess what? It’s still fun even after all of these years! This game is not the quietest of activities, but it’s great for those task boards where you can play some music and have a little fun. All you need for this station is a Jenga set and some math problem cards. Now, there’s a couple ways to do this; a) you can tape the problems onto the blocks or b) you can have them draw a card for every block they successfully remove/replace. Here’s a picture for reference and I’ve attached my decimal division strips below if you want to use them. Enjoy!

Math Memory

Who doesn’t love a good game of memory, right? Ok, I have to admit that this one isn’t the fan favorite in class, but it beats me droning on at the front of the board for an hour. If you asked my kids, they’d say just about anything beats thatJ

For this one, I simply created a table in a word document where I imported problems and answers (in different boxes, of course), printed it out, then put a colored piece of cardstock behind it before laminating and BAM- you’re done. I generally use a different colored cardstock for each concept so they don’t get all mixed up together. I’ve made a couple of sets so far and they’re a really great review before a test. Feel free to snag the template below or leave a comment if you’ve got an easier way of doing it. Thanks and have a lovely night.

 

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