I am the first to admit, I’m not the biggest fan of worksheets. Too often when students are working independently on worksheets they are not fully engaged in their learning. They are going through the motions or mimicking what the teacher just did in the lesson. The assignment is not memorable. The worksheets are normally a lot of similar problems over and over and over.
I much prefer to have my students working together and doing activities that are memorable and meaningful. Over the years I have created so many of my own games and activities to have my students complete instead of the independent practice that the district provided curriculum provided. I’m not saying curriculums are bad, there are some really good ones out there. Many of them though don’t have a whole lot of the why behind the how in their instruction and the independent practice is just a worksheet full of problems.
A few years back I created First to 5. This is a perfect example of how students are getting practice multiplying whole numbers by 1/10, 1/100 or 0.1 and 0.01. The game is always varied and unpredictable. This particular skill is a 4th grade standard here in Ohio, but many 5th graders still need work with multiplying whole numbers by fractions and decimals. The game could be changed up by changing how many tenths or hundredths the students are multiplying by. This is a very easy way you can differentiate the game based off of your specific students’ needs. Change the fractions and decimals to 2/10 or 5/100 to multiply by.
I created a quick 10 minute video to show you how the game is played.
The image below shows you what the game looks like as it’s getting played. You can see how the equations on the right are shown in the “whole” on the left for the conceptual part of the game. When we multiplied 11 x 1/100= 11/100 = 1/10 + 1/100 , you can see how we colored in a whole tenth and then another hundredth in green.
If you decide to have your students play this game in your classroom, let me know how it goes and what modifications you made to it in order to differentiate it for your specific students’ needs.
Blank Regular Dice from Amazon– 40 blank dice for $9.50
Blank Dry Erase Foam Dice from Amazon – 7 for $12.99
Chunky Dice from Box Cars– $1.75 each
