5 Math Games That Decrease Your Prep Time

Many of you know that I am a HUGE proponent of using math games to build your students’ mathematical minds.  However, the biggest complaint is that math games take so much time to prepare and then you have to teach the new game to the kids before they can go off and play the game on their own in math centers.  Then it’s just a cycle of rinse & repeat every time you want to introduce a new game.  Well, in this post I will share with you a way to decrease the prep time for math games, both for you and for training the kids on the games.

The secret is a thing I call Evergreen Games…. I give my childhood years a little credit in the name here.  I grew up working on my family’s tree farm, so for those of you not familiar, evergreen trees stay green all year round thus the name ever-green.

These games are Evergreen because they can be used with ‘ever-y’ 😉 math concept, plus, many can be used with any subject as well.  The BONUS is that once you teach the general rules of the game you don’t have to re-teach the game, you can just swap out the concept.  For example, Memory (finding two cards that ‘match’) is an evergreen game because you can play Memory with any content.  I can make a deck that the kids have to find a card with a number and find a matching card that shows a visual representation of that number.  Or I can make a deck where they have to ‘match’ two cards that add to 10. Or I can make a deck that shows a decomposed area model and the kids have to find the matching expression that shows the distributive property.  Each time I swap out the content within the game, I don’t have to teach how to play a new game because they already know.  I just have to explain what is considered a ‘match.’

The concepts you can ‘teach’ through Memory are endless and thus it makes the game Evergreen.  Below are three images from the Evergreen Games download showing how the game of Memory can be modified to fit the needs of your students:

Make 10 Memory

“Half of” Memory

Equivalent Fraction Visuals Memory

There are 5 games that I feel are Evergreen Math Games; Memory, Capture 4, Bump, I Have Who Has, and Difference To.  I’ve created a set of Google Slides that gives you an explanation of each one PLUS some pre-made games for each type of game…AND because it’s a Google Slide document, you can make a copy (or download it) and then modify it to change out the games for whatever math content you want kids to work on.  Click the image below and I’ll email them to you.

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