GAMES

Games – Just a fun fill in OR an effective instruction and/or assessment activity?

Just last week I had a substitute teach my class for a day while I was away.  The sub worked on equivalent decimals and renaming decimals as fractions. When I returned the next day I realized that after this day my students would have a long weekend and because I wasn’t in class yesterday I didn’t know how well they had grasped the decimal concept. I decided to have them play decimal snap so that I could circulate and get an idea of their understanding of what an equivalent decimal was. Each pair of students was given a stack of cards which had either a decimal number written in the tenths, hundredths or thousandths or a picture of a grid divided into tenths , hundredths or thousandths with part of the grid shaded. The only instructions I gave the class was to share the cards equally with your partner, each person turn over a card and if you get a pair of equivalent decimals say ‘snap’.

Circulating the class it was so much easier to get a grasp on who understood the concept than it would have been if I had given them written text book questions and had taken these in to correct one by one. An added bonus was that the students loved math class and had a ball reviewing and learning a math concept.

A couple of things I noticed that I had not planned to assess or ‘look for’ happened that I found interesting.

1)      A student of ‘lower ability’ became bored with the game and decided not to play after a few minutes. She spent the rest of the class just ‘wandering’ while others played. This was similar to the students at Phoenix Park who were off task.  I wonder, would I allow this to happen in all my classes if this student decided not to participate? I wonder how my administrator would react to this?  I don’t think this would fly as a continual practice in elementary especially and not likely in high school at my school.

2)      I was pleased with the number of different ways my students chose to play the game. As I circulated the 12 groups I noticed that about half of the groups had devised another method of play. Some had combined rules from other games they had played such as ‘go fish’ and others had decided to only deal out half the cards and keep a center base pile. In the end it didn’t matter how the played the game, only that they were reviewing and learning about equivalent decimals while having fun.

Boaler, J.  (2002). Experiencing school mathematics:  Revised and expanded edition.  New York:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.