Playing with Numbers: Building Fact Fluency with Math Games

Playing with Numbers: Building Fact
Fluency with Math Games
Jane Felling
source: Today’s Catholic Teacher, October 2014
Are you looking for engaging and effective ways to help your elementary students gain confidence and competence? Games are a powerful teaching tool in the math classroom, engaging
students at all levels, and are also a lot of fun. Math games that incorporate the use of inexpensive—and easily found—cards and dice are appealing to all learners and learning styles and are
easily differentiated across grade levels. This article will share the benefits of using games as a
teaching strategy, as well as several activities to use in your elementary classroom and to send
home for practice.
Why Games?
Students love to socialize and love to play games.
Why not engage this natural playfulness to teach
them? As students play with cards and dice they
become engaged with the subject matter. Students must communicate their thinking with
other players and analyze their own choices and
those of their opponents. During some games,
they may also record their play. If your school
has adopted the Common Core State Standards,
these games help to create deeper levels of understanding in line with those standards.
Games that use cards and dice are fun and motivating for students. They provide a meaningful
context for repetitive practice and exploration of
concepts necessary for building not only understanding but also automaticity. Fact fluency
for many of our students requires a great deal of
practice, and games allow for this in a nonthreatening way. A change of pace away from the pressures and boredom of paper-and-pencil practice
can help build confidence and competence when
it comes to fact fluency for many learners, not
just those who struggle.
Cards and dice are multi-sensory. All learning
channels are engaged as students work with
manipulating cards and dice for counting,
adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing,
multi-digit work, fractions, and place-value and
problem-solving concepts. Visual and kinesthetic learners can see and touch the manipulatives;
and math talk is a natural extension of playing,
engaging our auditory learners.
Games are rich in problem-solving situations;
and students have the time to move beyond rote
memory, making connections through math
talk, sharing of strategy, and discovering patterns
as they play. As students explore strategies in a
game, there are rich opportunities for reasoning,
making sense of problems, and persevering in
solving them. As students play, sharing of ideas
and problem solving often lead to making rule
adaptations, creating new games or game variations that increase the difficulty of the math.
The act of creating and inventing games further
deepens students’ understanding of the specific
math concepts they are working with.
In our classrooms we use games every day
during math class to practice basic fact fluency.
These games might also be used outside of regular math class times: before recess and dismissal,
with our cross-graded reading buddies instead of
sharing a book, in after-school programs, and on
days when recess is held indoors due to weather.
They are sent home in our math-games backpacks for homework and used to make connections between the classroom and home.
Following are six games—some our students’
favorites—for you to try in your classroom. They
can also be used at a family math games night
or sent home in backpacks for home play. Either
way, get your math program rolling and stack the
cards for ensuring success in your math class!
All games copyright Box Cars and One-eyed Jacks inc.
All games copyright Box Cars and One-eyed Jacks inc.
All games copyright Box Cars and One-eyed Jacks inc.