Welcome back!

In Victoria, our students, families and school communities are about to begin Term 3... welcome back!

We hope everyone has had a restful break (no matter where you are!) and are ready to go, in what is sure to be another action packed term!

One way to get our students back into the swing of school is to ease them back in with an engaging and fun game. Here is a throwback to one of my favourites to get student's maths brains ticking over again...

 

 GREEDY GOATS

(also known as Greedy Pigs).

This is a whole class game that develops student's mental addition skills and thereby improves both fluency and accuracy. This game also provides great opportunities to to discuss strategies (reasoning) used for mental computation - counting on, building to 10, doubles and near doubles etc.

 

What you will need...

• Students - paper and a pencil
• Teacher - six sided dice

 How to play...

• The class decides upon a 'Greedy Goat' number (for example... 2)
• All students stand up (at their tables), the teacher rolls the dice & calls out the number
• Students record the number that has been rolled (for example 5)
• The teacher rolls again, students mentally add this number on to the first number and record the result (for example, if the teacher rolled a 3, students would now have 5, 8 recorded)
• The teacher continues to roll the dice and students continue to add on and record their next answer (for example, 5, 8, 12, 18, 19, 22...)
• Students can choose to sit down at any time - when they sit down they put a circle around their tally and cannot join back in that round
• If the Greedy Goat number is rolled - any students still standing are out and their tally does not count - their total score for that round is 0
• Play three rounds and all students add up their three final round scores - the student with the highest overall score is the winner

Variations...

• When introducing the game - play together and teacher also records numbers for students to see
• Stop after every 5 rolls and check what number students are up to - anyone who is not correct, is out
• Use a dice with larger numbers (eg 10 sided dice/20 sided dice)
• Select two Greedy Goat numbers
• To support students who find mental calculations difficult - allow them to use a calculator
• Only say the number once (if students are not listening - they will miss the number and will be out)
• Choose a starting number (for example 100) and get students to subtract from this number, rather than adding on. Students with the lowest number at the end of three rounds will be the winner
• For extension - use a dice with fractions/decimals

 

 I am sure we all have a favourite maths game! If you would like to share - feel free to email us at kpisurf@gmail.com or leave a comment below.

To all of our followers who are about to start back at school - have a great week!