4. Working in a Candy Factory - This was a really powerful activity for arrays in multiplication. Students had to create AREA models of multiplication to arrange pieces of candy. How many ways could students create candy boxes for 8, 12, 20, 24 and 30? They were given graph paper and base 10 blocks. At first I only gave them 8 blocks. They had to create a 1x8, and a 2x4. If students created a 4x2, we flipped it around to see that it was the same, or SYMMETRICAL (sneak in that vocab!). All possible combinations were glued down to a paper, and those papers went into their math notebooks. I then upgraded the students to 12 blocks. I never told students how many possible combinations there were -- that's a powerful math conversation to let them have among themselves. I did allow partner work - which I usually do in math. Check out some photos of the kiddos in action:
PS -- really look at their faces - you can see some "ah-ha!" moments, and you can even see the "math talk" going on between students!
I love the last picture-- The expression is priceless with the "thinking" face.
This was very cool - it was a game board that went to 100. I had the students color each 10, grab the dice, and two game counters of different colors. The rules were simple - roll and count up your number. When you landed, you had to round the number either up or down. Example: You start by rolling a twelve. Since you are on 0, you count up twelve. You land on the 12 square, which rounds down to 10, so you stay on 10. If you were on 0 and you rolled a 4, you would stay on 0. The first person to reach 100 wins, and WOW - was it competitive! This was such a great game because it really put into practice 0-4 round down and 5-9 round up. After a few rounds of this game, students started to just "know" which way to round. That really helped the next week when we moved into rounding to the nearest hundred and thousand. (Also note-- this was book character day - and although you can't see everyone's costume in these pictures we have Heidi, Greg from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Junie B. Jones)
I decided I better keep my "favorite things" to only 5 lessons. These really were favorites of my students and myself. If you would like any more information, let me know! Both the Candy Factory and the Rounding Game came from a Dan Mulligan in-service done for our county.Sometimes I changed the rules/directions/format to fit the needs of my students. Hope you enjoy these games and ideas as much as my kiddos did!
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