Reinforce your fifth graders' problem-solving skills by giving them a weekly math puzzle. Post one puzzle at the beginning of the week online or on a bulletin board, and give prizes to the students who submit correct answers with their solution clearly written step-by-step. At the end of the week, ask the first student who submitted the correct answer to share the solution with the class. These puzzles can be math riddles, number sequences, geometric manipulations or other logic questions that require critical thinking.
You've probably played card games like Crazy Eights and Blackjack, but there also are countless card games targeted toward the skills that fifth graders are learning. For example, if you are working on exponents, you can arrange the students in pairs and give each pair a deck of cards. Have one player draw two cards and use those cards to create a number raised to an exponent --- that is, if they draw a four and a three, they can have four raised to the third power or three raised to the fourth. Students can either use a calculator or scrap paper. The object is to have the most points after five hands. Alternatively, if you are studying percentages, divide students into groups of three to five and give each group a deck of cards. Have students pick a percentage for the game --- 50, 10 or 1 is best for the first round --- and have the players take turns flipping over the top card. The first person to correctly give the chosen percentage of the card gets to take the card, so if the percentage is 50 and the card is four, the first person to say "two" gets the card. The person with the most cards at the end wins.
Many students believe that math will never help them in the real world, but sending them out to find real-world math can dispel this erroneous belief. Ask students to find the best deals at grocery stores by calculating cost per unit, or set up your own stores in the classroom and have students use math to calculate their expenses, set their prices or put on sales to stay competitive. You could also have students bring in a newspaper and do projects on the statistics or stories that they find, encouraging them to question whether the data are properly represented, or ask them to find misleading advertisements that take advantage of the fact that most people do not stop to think about or do math.
Mathematics plays a key role in the interpretation of data, and it can help students think critically about the information they receive. Have students collect data on a topic that interests them, such as how many people can taste a difference in cookies made with real sugar versus artificial sugar, how many times different people can make a basket or how long it takes for different people to catch a falling yardstick. Ask them to present their data in an absurd or skewed way, trying to convince their classmates of a certain misleading point, then ask them to present the data in a factual and informative way.