SamizdatMath

This is a rounding game I developed for a colleague at my school: I am a working teacher (as I have been for the past 37 years) so I know stuff. And here’s what I know: games are fun, learners like to play games, and games should exercise the learner’s mind in a variety of ways. Which is how I developed the “rounding” and “un-rounding” games. The “Rounding Game” is your basic bingo game: you turn over two cards, round off the number to the nearest ten, find that rounded number on the bingo board

Here's the deal: you want your students to practice rounding off numbers so you give them one of these rando "worksheets" with lots of numbers saying "round off to the nearest ten," "round off to the nearest hundred," yadda yadda yadda and they do it and forget about it and it's just a superficial way to approach this important topic. This takes the whole topic and reverses it, making it far more interesting and useful: each booklet starts by asking "When rounded off to the nearest thousand, it

And we're back! This is the first of a set of "coin card" activities that I designed for our first grade teachers and which received universal "thumbs up, Robert!" from the students who used them. I even tried it out on a 2nd grader who needed some remediation and she went to town on it as well. So what's so good about these? Let me count the ways: 1) Quantity: there are 30 different cards, which means that its not so many that your kids will get lost, but not so few that they'll finish them

Here's a new version of this SmartBoard activity: the idea is to teach subtraction skills by "jumping" from one number to another number through smaller steps. Press the button and two numbers will appear in each box on the number line. Your kids can grab one of the little figures on the size and show the different "jumps" and label their size to get from one number to another, which shows their "difference" better know as the answer to a Subtraction problem! Check this out - it's free! What d

“One, Some or None” is an activity that develops critical thinking skills by provoking students to think about the multiples and divisibility. Three cards are selected from a deck of clues; the students’ task is not to figure out “the answer” but what number of answers are possible. Included in this packet is an extensive description and discussion of how to develop these problem solving and critical thinking skills, while focusing on the concept of multiples and divisors.

Straight out of Gowanus, Brooklyn, here are bright & beautiful illustrated subway cars that can be connected to make a train of number facts. NOW IN COLOR! I've taken these specialty created subway illustrations (available NOWHERE ELSE!) and re-touched them in beautiful color ready to be printed, laminated and cut. Keep them for a lifetime! Print out each set of b& w subway cards on a different colored card stock (to keep them sorted) and challenge children to a variety of different skip count

Number Snakes is a game that develops strategies dealing with place value, numeration, seriation and proportionality. Students choose two cards to make a double digit number, name it, and then decide on which "band" of a snake it should go. However, as more bands of the snakes are filled in, the game becomes more difficult, as careful attention must be paid to how far apart each number should be. There are 7 different levels of the game, from filling in 3 spaces, to filling in 8 spaces, as wel