Why your students need to create their own math games
I teach in a gifted education pull out room, however, this project can be adapted perfectly into any classroom. Creating games is a fun and easy way to reinforce/assess students knowledge of a taught skill. I used these projects at the culmination of learning about time and money in 1st and 2nd grade, but it can be used for everything and everyone. Your students will have a blast creating these games while you are able to cover a wide array of check ups. On top of assessing knowledge of the topic you will also reinforce the following skills:
-Team collaboration
-Listening to other’s opinions and ideas
-Critical and creating thinking
-Writing skills
How to get started…
Students are going to create a game from scratch. They will create the board, pieces, objective, other materials (dice/spinners), and directions packet.
- Decide what concepts you want to be covered (I required my students to incorporate telling time and/or money).
- Place students in groups, let them partner up, or have them work independently.
- Review the game creation requirements, and show them examples of student created games or other math games (we played several simple math board games in the weeks leading up to).
- Show students all materials that are available to them (I printed off some game board templates or they could use poster board to make their own, and I made multiple other materials such as counters, clocks, paper money, and create your own dice papers.) Use whatever you have in you classroom or find free printable on-line.
Finishing and playing games
When students are finished make sure they play their game several time to work out any kinks. Have them read through their rules to each other and play as they read to make sure there are no gaps.
Next, they can rotate and play each others games. I did this in many different ways over several class periods.
- They rotated with their group to other games
- They chose NEW partners and rotated to games with them
- They randomly chose their favorite game to play and joined anyone else who chose the same game
Review and Grading
I chose to have the students assess themselves. For this I used the following review sheet…
