Mathematical games create a lively atmosphere. Prepare your students for this type of work by setting guidelines. Discuss how to speak calmly and practice responding to your signal for quiet. Allow students to explore materials, games and manipulatives without explaining the rules first. This way, they have the chance to discover relationships between objects and make predictions about how they will use them. Model how students should handle the manipulatives, share objects, cooperate during play and clean up when the math games are finished.
The easiest way to start math games is with table group activities. Start with a simple game. Give each group of four students a set of blocks and have them work together to create a pattern. Have them copy the pattern into their math journals and explain their processes to the rest of the class. Draw a pattern on the board for table groups to recreate. Gradually make the patterns more complex, and then ask table groups to show with their manipulatives what shape would come next in the pattern.
Memorizing math facts can become an exercise in drill and kill. Liven up the process by using math games to help transfer new information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Give each student or set of partners a set of fun, small manipulatives, such as plastic bugs or marbles. Have them use manipulatives to illustrate equations based on your current math objectives. For example, if you are teaching the relationship between addition and subtraction, they can create two piles of bugs and tell you how many there are in all, and then reverse the piles to model the subtraction equation. Have them write the equations they make in their math journals.
One of the best ways to create a culminating experience for a math lesson or unit is with a whole class challenge. After studying perimeter, ask the class to use small base 10 blocks to find out the perimeter of the whole classroom. Students learning measurement may work together to fill a math chart with their recordings of the measurements of different classroom objects. Have the class work together to correct mistakes on a multiplication poster or to fill in the blanks on a giant skip-counting card.