Gamifying Your Teaching!

I am so bored of worksheets!  Worksheets, worksheets, worksheets! If I am bored of worksheets you had better believe that our students are bored of worksheets.  My solution?  Gamification! 

What am I talking about?  You can use simple, easy to make games to get your students practicing new concepts and learning while they do it, and best of all, NO worksheets included!  You are probably thinking: But I need them to know how to add mixed numbers and they need to practice in order to get better at it.  Enter: Worksheets.  But here's the deal, take the problems you would put on that dreaded worksheet and use them to create your game. 

My Go-To Games are Bingo and Board Games!

Board Games: Make a game board and then make simple "task cards" for the children to draw from before they roll their dice.  I prefer to have all of my students answer the question before we can go on versus having just the student who's "turn" it is to answer the question.  Better yet, head over to TpT and buy my Ready Made Board Games!

BINGO: Make up the problems to call out and either have students make their own boards by placing the answers or create randomized boards on your own for a quicker start to the game!

Math Card Games

I have always love playing games, but my favorite kind of games are card games!  So I decided, why not use my love of cards games in my teaching?!  In all fairness, I found the inspiration for this game when trolling Pinterest, but I couldn't resist creating one of my own!

The game of Spoons traditionally uses a deck of playing cards and spoons (one less than the number of players).  Each player starts with 4 cards in their hand.  The object is to get all 4 cards in your hard to be the same (all Aces for example).  Play starts when the first person draws a card from the deck, they decide if they would like to keep the card or pass it on.  If they keep it they must choose another card from their hand to discard and pass on.  Play continues this way, if all the cards are used the first player can draw from the discard pile.  When one player gets all 4 cards matching they quickly and quietly grab a spoon from the center, once one person grabs a spoon, all bets are off and the other players must quickly grab spoons.  The player left without a spoon is out and a new round begins.  That is the inspiration for my Equivalent Fraction Spoons Game.

When I play with my students I cut the spoons out of the equation all together so that each player stays in the game from round to round. 

These cards have their fraction repeated in the upper left-hand corner so that you can easily see your cards while you hold them in your hand.

Each card is part of a 5-card set of equivalent fractions.  The base fractions range from simple unit fractions like 1/2 and 1/8 to other fractions such as 2/3 and 3/4.

As always, feel free to visit my TpT Store for other cool games/activities I have created!
 
 
 

Fractions, Fractions, Fractions!

You can't think about 4th grade math without thinking about Fractions!  Now that we have reached February it is time to bust out those fraction lessons!  I like to start my fractions unit with a week of two of basic fraction review using models and number lines.  Then work into equivalent fractions.  After Winter Break we will be delving into comparing fractions (oh my!)



I don't know about your students, but mine LOVE I Have Who Has and I love it too!  It's so easy and low prep and you can play the game over and over.  It gets the whole class involved and we like to play a few rounds at a time so that we can time our selves each round to try to beat our group time!  SO motivating for the students!  This is a great way to get all your students engaged at once!

For our fraction unit, I developed two different I Have Who Has games.  The first one uses Fractions on a Number Line (above) and the second one uses Circle Fraction Models (right).  Both of these great, easy, low prep games can be found in my TpT Store!

Teaching Angles

My favorite part about co-teaching is having the extra resources to create some awesome stations!  Our daily math block is divided up into 3 sections.  First, a warm up, then a whole class mini-lesson we call the concept development.  Lastly, we split into stations.  2 teacher-led stations and 1 independent station.  

This month we are teaching angles.  Finding unknown angles can be really difficult for some of our 4th graders so I designed a fun game to get the kids practicing their angles.  These dominoes include supplementary angles, complementary angles, and adjacent angles.
If you want these awesome dominoes for yourself, get them here on my TpT page!   The set includes 30 different dominoes ready to be printed on cardstock and laminated.