Kids still need practice, but the type of math practice that we provide kiddos needs to change.

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Video series prior videos
#1: Why you shouldn’t teach math through a textbook
#2: How to Teach Elementary Math Without a Textbook
#3: Creating School Change When Others Don’t Want To
#4: Components of Number Sense in PreK-2
#5: Components of Number Sense in 3rd-5th
#6: Teaching Math through Story Problems
#7: Math Practice: Building Math Fluency through Games

• Download the Guide to Teaching Elementary Math Without a Textbook
• Developing Computational Fluency with Whole Numbers in the Elementary Grades by Susan Jo Russell
• 1 Through 10 card game
• Well Played books 
• VersaTiles from Hand2Mind
• Video of my sons using VersaTiles

3 Areas of Fluency

Flexibility is one of the key pieces though in truly building fluency. So there is lots of things that we could be doing to help build kids’ flexibility and that’s a lot of where that conceptual understanding comes into play. We are building their flexibility by providing manipulatives, creating lots of visuals with kids, helping them see different approaches so that they have different ways to get to the answer. All of that plays into building flexibility. 

Oftentimes the way to become more accurate and more efficient, people think we just need to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. Like the more you practice the better you get, but I think that if we aren’t solid with our flexibility first, all that practice that we do doesn’t help. 

I tell people all the time this story of how I like to golf, but I’m not very good at it and I don’t go very often. If I did go out right now, my swing isn’t all that great, so I’m just going out and practicing a bad swing. I’m not building my flexibility and understanding of golf to get my swing better.  So when I go out and I think that I’m practicing, I’m really not increasing my accuracy or my efficiency because the foundation of my golf swing has not been built properly yet. 

So that’s my warning I guess before we start into this is that I don’t believe that we just need to jump right in to practicing with our students because they need that solid foundation of understanding and building their flexibility, so that when we do give them practice they have that to draw upon to help them actually become more accurate and more efficient. 

Okay so then when kids are ready for practice, what should that actually look like? In one of the prior videos I brought up this image of if you Google math practice almost every image is an image of a worksheet-style.

 Kids are just supposed to be sitting there doing worksheets for practice. And if you know me and you know my message, I like to talk a lot about how #MathIsNOTaWorksheet. That should not be the image that comes up for math practice.

The Power of Practice Through Games

Number one, games make it fun. It’s way more fun to play a game than to fill out a worksheet, so games make it fun. They also provide tons of practice in a short timeframe. If you’ve ever done games in your classroom, kids are having so much fun playing and when it’s time to stop, they’ll moan and they’re like, “No, we don’t want to stop,” and half the time they don’t even realize they were doing math. If that’s what you use for some of your math time they’re like, “When are we going to start doing math time?” They don’t even realize they’re doing it. So to me, games are the number one way to help kids practice because it’s fun and it gives kids tons of practice in a short timeframe. 

Now here’s one word of caution. Typically in a classroom we tend to do the same game with all of the kids, like we’ll teach the game, now everybody goes and plays that game, and then we come back at the end of it. Now there’s a time and a place for that, especially if you’re going to be discussing that game.  One of the hard parts though is I see often is that you play the game, let the kids play the game, but then there’s no discussion afterwards. 

There either needs to be discussion during while they’re playing those games, walking around and having those discussions with kids, or as a whole group afterwards talking about what they noticed, what relationships they were building. What did they see happening? What were some stumbling blocks in the game? All of that kinda stuff, but oftentimes the discussion doesn’t happen. 

So the only time I would suggest using a whole class game where everybody’s playing the same game, even if they’re off in pairs, if everybody’s playing the same game, the power of that is to have a discussion afterwards. Now if you’re not going to be doing that, then I would also recommend that you switch it up and allow kids choice in their games. That’s one of the powerful parts of games is that you can allow kids to work on a game that is building a mathematical concept they need to work on because not everybody in your classroom needs to be practicing the same concept. 

Some kids might need harder numbers, so you might add an extra dice or two into their game. They might be doing a different concept even. If you’re 3rd or 4th grade, you might have some kids who still need to be working on addition and subtraction, while you have some kids who are moving into multiplication and division stuff. Allowing some choice during that practice time with games is super important.

Decreasing the Prep Work of Math Games

I’m going to give you some resources that are kind of my go-tos when I’m trying to find great games. Number one is just look to the games you know and love. Any card game, dice game, board game, domino game, all of those, kids will build some mathematical thinking from them. 

I don’t care what grade level you are in, those classic games still are very, very powerful. One of my favorite games, which is the game 1 through 10, I learned from a middle school teacher and she would play this with her 7th and 8th grade kids.  It’s so powerful for our young kids, but her kids were still needing some of that refreshing number sense that gets built in that game. So don’t discount those classic games that we all know and love, even if you work with upper grades kids. 

Now the next game I’m going to direct you to and of course there’ll be links underneath this video to all these resources, are my evergreen games. I like to use games that I just teach the concept of the game once and then I can just switch out the content. If you know the game like memory where you flip over all the cards and then you flip two over and see if you’ve got a match, the idea of that game you teach it once, but then you can switch out the content that’s in the cards and you can do it for different things. If kids are needing addition practice, you have a memory set that’s addition. If you need kids who need to work on subtraction, you have a memory game that is subtraction stuff. Multiplication, division, whatever it is, you just switch it out and you got them in baggies and the kids can go grab whichever one they’re needing to work on at the time. 

So evergreen games, there’s five different kinds of evergreen games and I’ll link to the post where I talk about those and you can get the download from there. My other favorite are the books Well Played. I’ll link to those, but those books have great resources and they have a book for PreK – 2, 3-5 and 6-8. If you’re needing great resources, that is one of the best books out there about using games and puzzles in your classroom. 

Now the other one that I want to bring to your attention is not really a game per say, but kids feel like it is. This is a thing by Hand2Mind, which I love their stuff. They’re a big supporter of me and I link to their stuff often because I love it, but this is their VersaTiles and it comes like a workbook, but the thing I love about it is in their workbooks, they have some that are visual things, but they also do have some that are just bare problems. 

So they mix it up for kids, but I love that kids aren’t just writing down answers. There’s some spatial thinking and stuff that goes along with this. There’s these tiles in here and they put their answers inside of this. I’ll link to a video of my son working on this below here for anybody who wants to see a little bit more in-depth, but the idea is these tiles go in here and it’s basically their answers. Then the way that they check their answers is they look to see if their visual matches the visual down at the bottom down here. So this needs to match that. If that is the same, then they got all of these answers correct. If it doesn’t look the same then something is up and they got to go back and figure out where they made their mistakes there. 

But I just love it because it is kind of like a puzzle. There’s some thinking and strategy that’s involved in it and it’s just a little bit more fun than writing things in a worksheet. And I was a little cautious of this because of this idea of what I often see happening with online games and apps on the iPad and computers is basically they are electronic worksheets. And so when I got this I was a little skeptical. Like, “Is this going to be like a worksheet?” And it kind of is, but kids just love it a whole lot more than putting into a worksheet. 

I want you to pay attention though to games and apps that we tend to use for practice because most often it is just an electronic worksheet. And I once heard Kayla from Top Dog Teaching say that if it’s boring on paper, it’s going to be boring on an iPad. So just be careful of those online games because really they’re just electronic flashcards and electronic worksheets. 

I hope that this has helped you build your math mind, so you can go build the math minds of your students. I hope that you have enjoyed this series about how to teach without a textbook. If this is the first video you’re seeing in this series, make sure that you grab the download, which is your guide to teaching math without a textbook, have a great day.

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