games Archives - Ideas by Jivey

Bright Idea: Quiet Dice!

August 22, 2015

I absolutely love for my students to play math games with dice… but I do NOT love 25 students dropping them on their desk tops, or rolling them across the room. Hence, this month’s bright idea:

Yes, you CAN have students playing math games at their desk without hearing that constant clatter. The solution? This aisle in Hobby Lobby (or whatever your local craft store may be):

FELT!

They have every color and design of felt you can imagine. The plain colors only cost a quarter, so I went with those.

Now, just like with every other routine in your classroom, you have to teach them HOW to play with dice and roll them on the felt. We practice together… and during stations, if I hear dice, they get one warning. The next time, they have to put up the dice for that day and I give them a “not-so-fun” review activity to do instead. It only takes one warning!! I’ve never had a student actually have to put the dice away. 🙂

So, how DO you roll dice without making noise or having them rolling across the room? First pick up the dice and “make a bubble” around them. Explain you want the dice to move in your hands but you don’t want them to ESCAPE.

Shake the dice gently, then put the sides of your wrists on the felt, before opening your hands. (Let your students know this is an important step to keep the dice from flying…)

…AND THAT’S IT!

Super easy, right? But believe me. They will need to practice. You’d be amazed at how many think by squeezing the dice and shaking their hands, the numbers are moving around on the dice. HA!

Good luck, and I hope this helps save a little sanity during math stations. 🙂

If you enjoyed this bright idea, please consider joining me on Facebook, Instagram, or my TPT Store for more great ideas.

For more bright ideas from other bloggers, please browse through the link-up below and choose a topic/grade level that interests you. Thanks for visiting!

An InLinkz Link-up

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Minute to Win It!

June 1, 2015

If you have never played Minute To Win It in the classroom, you have been missing out!! We played these games almost the entire last day of school! It’s a super cheap and fun way to “play” with your kids. *I did NOT create any of these games- these are games that you can easily find by doing a search on the internet!*

GAMES WITH CUPS:

Moving On Up is a good starter game- most of mine could complete it! You will need two colors of solo cups. I got mine on sale at Kroger! They come in bags of 50, so with this game, you can have multiple players competing at once. Change out one cup in each stack for the opposite color. In one minute, students should try to move the bottom (different colored cup) to the top by taking the top cup of the stack and moving it to the bottom. They can only use their hands (no leaning the cups against their body).

Stack Attack is a bit trickier! Students not only have to build a tower with the cups, but then unstack them and put them back into one stack! Almost all of them got their stack built in one minute, but only a couple could unstack them without them falling all over the place! They still loved this one though!

Finally, students had to knock cups off of their desk using only the air they blew into a balloon in the game, This Blows. Most could do this with no problem! They love the noises it makes too, of course. ;o) Once they finished this game, I had them blow up the balloon and we used them for a couple of other games…

In Point Up, they all had to keep their balloon in the air for one minute only using one pointer finger. After this game, we split into two teams and had a “relay race” to pop all of our balloons (one at a time) in one minute. The balloons were on one side of the room and the chair they popped the balloon in was on the other side of the room. I was worried some wouldn’t want to pop it, but they all loved it!

GAMES WITH FOOD:

They will be hungry after all that, right? Give them a little snack!

Face the Cookie is as fun to watch as it is to play! Students put a cookie on their eye (close it!) then wiggle their face muscles to bring it down to their mouth. It’s so funny! They aren’t supposed to use their hands, but I let them hold their hand on their face in case it fell so they could start over. (They just weren’t allowed to touch the cookie!)

Students use a spoon in their mouth to scoop M&Ms from one bowl to the next. They were all able to complete this in one minute! If students don’t touch the candy, you can reuse it for the next game!

Suck It Up uses M&Ms, but most don’t want to eat them when they are done because they tended to drool down the straw. Ha!! Students sucked through the straw to “grab” an M&M, then carried it to the bowl. I gave them 25, and almost all of them were able to finish in one minute! I gave them milkshake straws because they have a bigger hole, but the game works with regular straws, too.

Noodling Around was hysterical! Using only a spaghetti noodle between their lips, students had to get as many penne pastas on their noodle as they could in one minute. Some were GREAT at it, and ran out of room on their noodle before time was up! Some dropped the penne pasta they had loaded on their spaghetti as they tried to get another. This one is easy to have multiple competing at once!

The last game we played was super easy and just for fun.

I put a dab of Vaseline on the end of each kid’s nose, then they took a “Nose Dive” and got the cotton balls from their bowl! It was a fun way to end the games because they were all successful (and laughed the whole time)!

To play all of the games we played, you need:

Shopping List for Minute To Win It With Ideas by Jivey

If you are like me, you have many of these items lying around your classroom or house already! Enjoy these fun games this year, or in years to come!

And P.S.- there are SOOO many more games out there- check out some more!

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Sparking Student Motivation: (Free) Math Game!

February 8, 2015

Well, I’m a day late to Joanne’s party, but I know she’ll forgive me. :o)

I wanted to share about a free game that has been in my TPT store for a long time, but oldies are definitely goodies if you ask me! Kids LOVE math games!

I am currently introducing my students to decimals in math. Make One Whole is a great game to help them understand that decimals are less than one whole, and that hundredths are smaller than tenths. I have my students use base ten blocks to represent their tenths and hundredths as well, so they can see the model as well as the number form.

Above is an example where I helped a student a bit- she wanted to use her 6 as six hundredths, and we talked about how far away she would still be from one whole if she did that. She decided it would be a good idea to make tenths instead since she only had two turns left.

This student made EXACTLY one whole in her game against her partner!!! I asked her if she rigged the die. Ha! I’d never actually seen a student do that until this year!

Go grab this game if you teach decimals- your kids will love it! And of course, I would love some feedback if you do use it! :o) Make sure to check out the other link-ups over on Joanne’s blog, too!

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Thursday Throwdown: Interactive Games!

February 6, 2014

Yes!! It’s Thursday… which means it is almost Friday!!!! This has been one of those weeks that I have been LOOKING FORWARD to Friday… maybe it’s because we actually had a 5-day week?? Anyway… I am linking up today to one of my besties, Erin, at I’m Lovin’ Lit!!! I just love all her ideas even though she teaches middle school… I can almost always adapt the ideas to my fourthsters!

Today, I wanted to share ways to make “boring” games more interactive. You know the ones. Sorting… Matching… I’m all about using those games, and for the most part, kids love them! They’d certainly never tell you they’d rather do a worksheet than a matching game… but sometimes, let’s be honest… flipping over a card trying to find its match, or moving some cards around to put them in order… it’s not that exciting. So I’ve adapted my games a bit to get the kids up and moving! I also love that I can take center games, that would usually take a week for all the kids to rotate through, and make them whole group games that take 10-15 minutes!

Yesterday, I teased you in my post about my idiom matching cards… they came from my 30 Idioms Pack.

I made all of my posters and the center game cards one of five colors when I created them. Soooo I sorted the cards out by colors, creating five sets of six idioms. Then, I split up my class into five groups. Each group got a set. They had one minute (I started out with two minutes but it was WAY too much time) to figure out the matches (matching the idiom with its meaning).

At the one minute mark, I walked around and told them how many they had correct. I didn’t tell them WHICH ONES were correct. Most of them actually figured out the meanings on the first try! I was so proud of them! But a few times, I had to say, “four are correct” and the group had to decide which ones they were sure about, and which ones they needed to change. One of my students piped in and said, “hey! This is like Hollywood Game Night!” I wanted to say, shouldn’t you be in bed when that’s on?? But I agreed- it’s just like the game where they have to put the celebrity photos in chronological order and Jane Lynch tells them how many are correct, but not which ones. My kids rotated through all five sets (10 minutes to do this activity, TOPS) and they seriously were SO excited to play. I can guarantee you I would not have heard the same squeals if I made them play the traditional match game. ;o)

Another traditional game that I make more interactive is number sorting. We are working on decimals right now, so I passed out number cards- one for each student. Then they had to put themselves in order from least to greatest, but there’s a catch… they CAN’T TALK. Oh man. You have to try this… it’s so funny how frustrated they get with people in the wrong place and they have to just use hands and facial expressions to tell them they aren’t right. For example… this happens EVERY year, no matter how many times we talk about the equivalents of tenths and hundredths (3 tenths = 30 hundredths). My tenths cards will line up as least because, as seen below, 3 is less than 10.

I let them get situated in a line, then I tell them they are wrong, and I ask someone who CLEARLY knows (based on their body language -tee hee!) that the tenths are in the wrong place to tell why. Then they have an “OOOOOOOOHHHHHHH!!” moment and rearrange (as seen in the bottom pic). We have played this with fraction cards, too!

I hope these give you some more options to play games in your room! :o) I’d love to hear if you have any other ideas of making “center games” quick whole group games!

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