The Multiple Uses of Math Dice

I'm sure this discovery is nothing new to you full-time math teachers, but I have been having a blast using dice in my ALLab this year.

In the basic tournament game, kids roll a target number, then roll their blue dice and come up with an equation to reach that number. The person with an equation closest to the target number wins the round.

What I've done with math dice:

Part-part-whole: My first graders roll the white 12-sided dice, add the two numbers together for their target number, then roll their blue dice and "synergize" (one of our 7 Habits) to build addition equations to reach their target number. (For example, 2+2+5+6+6=21.) They score tokens for every equation they can put together.

Place value & rounding: My third graders rolled the blue and white dice for a random number (up to five digits). They then had to practice rounding their number to each place value. Bonus: Kids who wanted a challenge added in a second set of math dice so they were rounding to the billions!

Graphing: A group of my second graders was getting bored interpreting bar graphs, so we used the dice to create their own. First, they rolled the three blue dice 10 times, using tally marks to track how often each was rolled. Then, they created bar graphs to show their results, and wrote two questions that other students could use to interpret their graphs.

How have you used Math Dice?

Facilitating Failure

This week, I posted about a cool LEGO math activity I did recently with my first graders. One of my kids -- a first-grader determined to learn square roots, as he believes himself to already be the master of lesser maths -- was not satisfied with a two- or three-digit number. Nope -- he wanted to go to five digits.

So, I let him. Did I know it would be nearly impossible to do in our limited time, with our limited number of LEGOs? Of course. And I didn't say yes because I wanted him to fail at his choice -- this wasn't a cheap opportunity to tell him "I told you so -- now, learn what I tell you."

Instead, I figured it would be a great "teaching moment" for him to really understand the idea of exponential growth behind place values.

First, he picked a number in the 50,000s. He quickly revised that downward to 10,000 -- still quite the feat to accomplish with LEGO studs.

We added. We skip-counted and multiplied (he is gifted at math). We never made it to five digits, but I think, using the available base plates, that we made it to around 2,000 studs before he had to go back to class.

Sure, he failed at his original task -- building a five-digit number. But he and the two girls with him all left with a great understanding of just how huge a number 10,000 is.

Sometimes we learn more by failing than succeeding -- an important lesson I try to teach my GT kids, and one I often need to remember myself.

Building Math Skills Brick by Brick

Algebraic thinking, numeracy, math sense -- these words are all foreign to me. I think I know what they mean -- in a vague sense -- but never really concerned myself with them too much.

Until lately.

I have found myself in demand as an advanced math resource person these days -- a position I never expected to have, with majors in journalism and history and a career of teaching those two subjects. Thankfully, those previous areas of study have given me major research skills -- which I've put to use in the past month looking for hands-on math activities.

I came across this fabulous post by Alycia Zimmerman on Scholastic.com, which sparked my interest in what can be taught with LEGOs. I tweaked her "part-part-whole" activity a bit with my first graders recently, who have been studying place value.

I pulled 1x10, 2x10, 1x1 and 1x2 bricks from my LEGO bins, as well as some plates and base plates. (If you just got lost on the LEGO terminology, check out this glossary post from thebrickblogger.com.)

Ready to start, I piled the LEGOs in the middle of the table, and handed the kids small whiteboards. First, they chose a random two- (or three-) digit number and wrote it on their whiteboards. Then, they got to build their number out of LEGOs. They used the 1x10 and 2x10 bricks for their tens place, and the smaller bricks for their ones place.

56 = 20+10+20+2+2+1+1

Wanting to expand their numeracy? skills (please correct me if that is not the correct use of that concept -- like I said earlier, I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole math terminology thing), I had them write out the equations they just built. For example: 56=20+10+20+2+2+1+1.

They loved it!

If you have any awesome ideas for using LEGOs in math, (or any awesome hands-on math ideas), please post them below -- I am always on the hunt for more.