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?