{photo from SLOCA’s flickr site}
Instead of Monday Mix-ins, today we want to talk about Math Mania, which is happening in just a few weeks – March 3rd! This is a special evening where we honor and celebrate all things Math, and our kids have the chance to build a math game or design a presentation to share with others in our school community. These projects are always inspiring to see and fun to interact with!
By now we’ve all received the Math Mania information for each child’s level (ask your teacher if you aren’t sure what this is), and we hope it’s all pretty clear. The difficult part might simply be choosing what to do! Today we want to offer a few helpful suggestions and point you to some sources of inspiration.
The first thing we want to say is that the Home Instructor’s Guide (HIG) for your child’s level is a great place to start. The games are dispersed throughout the guide, so you may have to do a little hunting to find them, but it will only take a few minutes to flip through the book. (One SLOCA parent told us she likes to go through the HIG at the beginning of the year and mark every game with a little post-it, so she can easily flip to them when needed. Great idea!) The HIGs have games perfectly geared for kids in that level, and you can take a game idea from there and let your child come up with a creative way to make and package it, offering help as needed. Decide on a theme that interests your child (Space? Fairies? Renaissance painters?). Maybe they will want to add a twist to the basic rules of the game.
Some kids will want to go beyond the HIG and get really creative, and that’s certainly okay too! If, after looking through the HIG, you aren’t finding something your child is excited about, here are a few websites with math games you can make and play at home. Maybe one of these will spark your child’s interest.
(A note for parents of our 1st-6th grade students: if you do go with a math game idea from another source, we recommend using Singapore math vocabulary and strategies where possible in your version, to continue to reinforce the methods our kids are learning.)
Learn With Math Games has several pages with great ideas to get your math juices flowing:
10 Math Games to Play with Dominoes
Games for Gains – this site has some nice options on their “Teaching Ideas” page that could be turned into games. Scroll past the holiday games and click through to the other pages in this section as well.
50+ Fun and Interesting Middle School Math Games – some of these ideas are for apps or computer games, but scroll down the page to Card/Dice/Paper Games section, or the Graph Paper Games, or Physical Games for ideas you may be able to use.
And here are some photos of past Math Mania nights from 2 and 4 years ago, so you can see examples of the variety of games and presentations created:
Have fun everyone! And if you’ve found another helpful site for math game ideas, please share in the comments below.
