Math Game

"Victor Vampire was planning his birthday party. He needed enough food for himself and his three friends, Roger Werewolf, Gloria Ghost, and Zee Dee Zombie. Victor wanted everyone at the party to have three eyeballs for appetizers. Can you draw three eyeballs next to each guest and tell Victor how many eyeballs to buy at the Ghoul Grocery Store?"
And so goes a great math game from Peggy Kaye's book, "Games for Math". It's marvelous because it teaches adding along with the basics for multiplication and division all while having fun. My children loved these number stories today, and we spent a lot of time (perhaps more than we should have) doing them. They loved the story of Victor's Vampire Birthday and we also did one about six martians coming to earth.
To play: Start out with some characters, like above with Victor and his ghoulish friends. In this case there are four characters. Then you have the children draw three eyeballs per guy and then add them up to get a total. The story in the book continued on with five glasses of blood cocktails each. It got tricky when Victor had sixteen candy-coated monkey guts to divide equally among himself and his friends. In this case they drew out the sixteen monkey guts (little squiggles), and then one by one drew a line from each gut to each guy until they were all "given" out. Then they counted how many each of them got and came to the answer of four.
They enjoyed it so much that I'm sure we'll be doing it again soon.

It is funny, though. Playing this game just showed me (yet again) how different my children are from each other. Ds was content to quickly sketch out his characters and "treats" while Dd took...her...time...drawing...in...every...detail. Sheesh. I have to remind myself to not rush her along. That's why I chose to homeschool so that they COULD be individuals, but it doesn't mean it's not challenging. Today wasn't so bad because we were all in a great mood and doing something fun, but when she takes 15 minutes to write out one or two sentences it can wear on a person. Ah well. I love that she is so creative. Today was a great homeschooling day. :D

Those are magnetic tangrams on the left of the white board. Ds loves them and creates all sorts of shapes. I believe this particular one is a rocket ship.Dividing "monkey guts".


Dd's visiting martians.

Here's where I "encouraged" her to just put two arms per martian because she was lovingly (painfully for me) putting hands, fingers AND nails on...each...arm.

Chocolate Chip Math

Our math lesson on Monday consisted mainly of this game and a little work with the manipulatives.

Silly Sentences

I made a game called Silly Sentences for ds. First, I made a chart of Who/What, Where, and When subjects. Then to determine the sentence he rolled a die, first, to find out Who/What was in his sentence. Ex. If he rolled a three, he would've gotten "A polar bear", and then wrote it down. On his next roll, for Did What, he might have gotten a five, which would be "chased a mouse". He continued this way until his sentence was complete. He loved the strange sentences that resulted, and kept wanting to roll the die to make more. After he wrote a few different ones, I had him complete a short story using one of the sentences. He had a wonderfully imaginative story in the end. This was a great little game that we'll play again.

Games, Games, and More Games

We got some good games this year, and had a great time playing them...

Chinese Checkers with Grandpa. A classic one.
Cranium "Family Fun".

This game is filled with a variety of activities -

we had a blast playing this one.

The Amazing Labyrinth.

This is a fun strategic game. The game board is always changing because on each turn you slide in a tile which shifts the maze. I look forward to playing this a lot.

Mouse Trap

We got the game, Mouse Trap, for Christmas. The kids were eager to trap Adrian's mouse in the trap. There were a couple of failed attempts, but there was finally success. Here is a short video of that momentous event:

That's Good That's Bad

I taught the children a writing a game called "That's Good That's Bad". Yet again, I thank Peggy Kaye and her game making books.

First of all I made a spinner from card stock and attached the arrow with a paper fastener. I have yet to find a better way to make a spinner. This one works okay, but it isn't brilliant.

Next, I read to the kids a beginning of a story with That's Good That's Bad statements. For instance: "Little Johnny got an icecream. That's Good. The icecream fell on the ground. That's bad." The good/bad statements won't always go in this order, however, because the spinner will determine which one you write.

To add a bit of excitement (and motivation) you can add a points system. 5 points for a good statement, 3 points for a bad one, 8 points for both a good and bad statement, and 0 points for lose a turn. I wasn't going to do points, but ds was so happy whenever he got a lose a turn that I had to change it up. After I implemented the points he was hoping for the spinner to land on the good & bad statment.

So, you take turns flicking the spinner and each write down an appropriate statement including That's Good or That's Bad. Here's an excerpt from their story:

The monkeys picked up the bratty little brother.
That's bad.
The brother escaped.
That's good.
Tom & Gerry found the bratty little brother.
That's good.
The lions started to roar loudly.
That's bad.
Then they stopped roaring.
That's good.

And so on. I'm looking forward to their stories getting more imaginative as we do this more often. My biggest challenge was to not correct ds's printing. My goal for this game is for them to gain a love and enjoyment for writing. That won't happen if I'm always looking over thier shoulders. Because dd is just beginning to learn how to print, she dictated her part of the story to me.

Hooray for Learning Games!

This is why I love math games. Ds was drawing this on our white board. It's not the equations (he did the check marks) that I'm impressed with - it's his "I like math" comment. Last week he complained about a page of equations and about math in general, but then he wrote this today after our earlier math game. Yeah! THIS is why I homeschool - so that my kids will enjoy learning.

Double It

“Double It” is another math game from Peggy Kaye’s book. It reinforces addition and subtraction skills. This game takes a bit more preparation to make then Group Ten.

The game board is a spiral with notches. I put them in intervals of 5. Don’t make too many notches because it makes the game too long, and the kids get bored. Here is what our board looks like:



First you make 24 small cards (I cut up orange card stock) with 4 sets of numbers from 0-10. Then you make a second set of 24 small cards. These will be the “instruction” cards. I took Peggy Kaye’s suggestion and used 6 blank index cards and cut them into quarters to get 24 smaller cards. You make: 8 adds, 6 subtracts, 7 double one numbers, and 3 lose one turns.




To Play:

You pick 2 number cards and 1 instruction card. You might get a 6 and a 3 number card and an instruction card that says add. So, then you would move ahead 9 notches on the board. If the instruction says subtract then you would move ahead 3 notches. If it says lose a turn then you don’t move. If it says to double one number then you take the larger number and double it – in this case, you’d move ahead 12 notches. You take turns until someone goes around the spiral and wins the game. As usual we used our Math U See manipulatives to aide in the game.

Thank-you, Peggy Kaye

I try to learn from my mistakes. I’m still not feeling all that well and I didn’t want to have a repeat of what happened last Friday. Instead of re-introducing that math concept in the same boring way I decided to turn to my Games for Math book by Peggy Kaye. I found the perfect game. It’s called Group Ten. The paper game boards are divided into three columns. Reds (hundreds), blues (tens), and yellows (ones/units). Next time we’ll use green for units since that coincides with the Math U See manipulatives.

We used corresponding coloured buttons for markers, and then one red marker. You also need a deck of cards with the jokers and picture cards removed. She says to remove the tens, but we left them in. The object of the game is to get the one red marker.

To play: Take a card from the deck. Let's say you draw a four. You put 4 yellow markers in the yellow column. When you get to ten yellow markers you exchange them for a blue marker which goes into the blue column. You continue this way until you collect ten blue markers and finally exchange that for the red marker.

It’s a great way to teach place value and addition rules. She also has a subtraction variation. Or play with pennies, dimes, and dollars. We’ll give that one a try later. We had fun playing, and I could see the light turn on in ds’s eyes which was the point.