What to do over Break...MATH what else!

What do I want our students to do over holiday break?  Play games.  The power of numbers is often overlooked when playing games.  When students are able to apply their understanding of numbers to an application they build their number sense. Let’s explore a few traditional games and what math/number sense they help to strengthen.

• Dominos/Yahtzee – or any game that involves dice or dot patterns helps our students to be able
  
  to recognize dot patterns, refered to as Subitilizing, as a number and not just a group of dots. As students develop number sense they learn to recognize quantity. This is important to mathematics because we want students to move past counting every dot individually and just be able to recognize that the eight dots on a domino is eight or see it as two groups of four. This is the beginning of building our sense of number. For more about the power of Subitizing check out this article: http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/clements/files/Subitizing.pdf

• Card games- any card game that involves students being able to sequence, develop pairs, three or four of a kind is helping students to develop similarity with number knowing that a two of hearts is the same amount as the two of spades. That two is always two no matter how it is represented. 
• When I was a child growing up we used cards to play the game of war. (Split the deck between the players, flip a card and the person with the highest card wins both cards) Why not put it into a math context? As you play have students add the two cards together, or subtract. Yes it will even work with multiplication. Have the face cards be tens or make the Jack eleven, the Queen twelve and the King thirteen.

• There is also some my family’s favorites: cribbage, Monopoly, Life and Clue to name a few. With the game of cribbage the power of knowing the combinations of fifteen and being able to problem solve which cards will provide me with the most points while not helping my opponent gain points. With Monopoly, Life and Clue all involve problem solving and strategies to help you progress toward the end of the game. With our younger students games like Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, etc. all help strengthen our counting skills, directional skills as well as strategic thinking. For example in Sorry I need to move four, do I move one of my pieces four or do I split the move. If I split it how do I split four, one and three or two and two?  This is important mathematics for students being able to conceptualize that numbers are made of other numbers.

Just a few thoughts for you to pass along to your students or as parents’ items you might consider as we spend a few quality family days together.  Wishing you all a merry and joyful holiday season.