Middle School Math Moments (now Cognitive Cardio Math)

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This year our school was fortunate to be able to have an after-school program for math once a week (twice a week the month before state testing). I was one of the sixth-grade teachers who worked with the students after school. We had room for about 15 students, but had some difficulty convincing those students who really needed the extra time to take part in the program :( One afternoon, I decided to use a few different games with the students; one of those game was Yahtzee. I was so surprised to learn that of the 9 students present that day, only ONE had ever played it (she had only played it once or twice and didn't really remember how it worked!) Yahtzee is great for so many math skills - adding, multiplying, logical thinking, problem solving....I wish there was more time in my math classes to be able to spend time playing games like this! I wonder how many children ARE still playing these types of games.... I recently thought about the fact that Yahtzee could be used to ex

"Rock Around the Clock" is a great Mathline lesson that focuses on probability. In this lesson, students are presented with a contest situation: in packs of gum, there are photographs of six different rock stars. The first person to collect all six pictures, and take them to the radio station that is sponsoring the contest, will win an all expense paid trip to any location in the US! The questions posed to the students is this - "What is a reasonable number of packs of gum you should purchase in order to collect all six pictures?" This question is discussed as a class....to think about the fewest number of packs possible, but to consider how many packs would be reasonable. The students are then put into groups and each group is given materials to simulate the contest. I have used this lesson twice; once I used dice and once I used colored disks (on which I wrote the rock stars' names). When using the dice, students simply roll the die and then record the n