Don’t Discount the Use of Games in Your Classroom

Transcript

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 184: Don’t Discount the Use of Games in Your Classroom

This is my first podcast since winter break and the start of 2025.  I hope all of you had some down time and some fun times.  I definitely had some of those but a lot of my time over the break was spent moving.  A while back I did a life update and mentioned that we would be moving into a different home sometime in the future. Well it’s been awhile.  My husband has been remodeling the house that my father built when I was 2.  It’s the house my parents lived in my entire life up until a few years ago and that’s when my husband started remodeling it.  My husband is a general contractor so his job is building and remodeling and he’s been working on our place in his “spare time” which he doesn’t have much of, however the house is at a point that the kids & I wanted to be up there living in it and out of town so over the break we convinced him we should start the moving process.  So, we’ve had to sort through 15 years of stuff from this house and as you can see…my office isn’t part of what has been moved, this might be staying awhile until he finishes the other house because I don’t know where all my books and office stuff is actually going to go in the other house.

Along with moving, I’ve spent my time prepping for the 2025 Virtual Math Summit.  After this week’s podcast I will be sharing snippets from some of the sessions in these episodes.  We have some amazing educators this year and I’m excited to share those with you.  You can see the full line-up of speakers at VirtualMathSummit.com/speakers and if you haven’t registered for the FREE summit you can do that at VirtualMathSummit.com

While we wait to dive into Virtual Math Summit sessions, I thought I’d share something fun for you to do as you get back into the swing of things after break.  You all know by now that I love using math games to help kids practice math concepts so I’m going to share with you one of my favorite math game resources AND I’ve teamed up with my friend Marnie Ginsberg from Reading Simplified to share a reading game as well.

I focus solely on math education but all of you also teach reading or work with teachers who teach reading and so when Marnie and I were chatting over the break, we thought we’d each share something of each others and Marnie’s got this great game called Switch It that I think you need to implement into your reading time ASAP.

As a reminder, the reason I love games so much is because they are an easy way to engage your students in practicing a concept that allows them to get a ton of reps in a short amount of time and they don’t even realize it because they are having FUN!  Games are so much more fun than a worksheet.

The trouble with most games is that you have to teach all these new rules for every game and get out a bunch of items and it usually takes more effort & time than it’s worth….not the case with these games.

Reading Simplified’s game is called Switch It! I’ll link up Marnie’s website where you can request the download from her, but it’s just a couple pages you will print off and then cut some items out…super quick, easy, and throw them in a baggie for the next time you do it. As you progress with the game, you won’t even need that because once students learn the concept of the game and know how to write their letters, you can have students use a dry erase board and have them just erase one sound at a time and write in the correct letter-sound.

So what is Switch It? I could try to sound all professional like I know what I’m talking about but I don’t know the research around helping kids learn to read…that’s why I have friends I go to like Marnie.  I do know that there are foundations to learning to read just like the foundations of math understanding and some of those foundations are Phonics (letter-sound knowledge), Phonemic Awareness (the perception of individual sounds in words), and Decoding….and Switch It! helps with all of those in one activity that integrates them all.  Just like the way kids learn math, they learn reading….the more connectedness they see through concepts being integrated together the more synapsis that build in their brain to recall information when needed.

Marnie sent me this because she is the expert so I’m going to read directly what she says here:
Switch It is one word work activity that accomplishes all of these foundational skills, yet by integrating a host of processes simultaneously such as:

• the concept of the alphabetic principle (that our written language is a code for sounds)
• phonemic segmentation
• phonemic manipulation (a harder phonemic awareness task)
• letter-sound knowledge
• early decoding
• early spelling

I LOVE it when games address multiple concepts because any time you take makes it feel worthwhile since it’s such a powerful activity.  

So Marnie also sent me this description:

If you are familiar with word chains, Switch It is a particular type of word chain with a few distinctive features:

• The student does the work because the teacher prompts, “Which sound do you need to move to turn ____ into ___?” (Some word chain directions have the teacher tell the students which letter to move and then the students just have to read the word. A fine activity! But asking the child to do the discriminatory thinking of manipulating phonemes in and out of words is challenging and phonemic manipulation is associated with good reading ability.)
• Letter-sounds are taught via Switch It, rather than having to teach them in isolation first. The teacher merely adds a new letter-sound to the board. If the child knows it, good. If not, the teacher just identifies it for the child in the process of the game.
• Teachers aim to keep progressing in phonemic difficulty (i.e., from CVC to CVCC to CCVC to CCVCC to CCCVCC) which pushes phonemic awareness and sound-based decoding skills.
• The feedback the teacher gives when students make an error is vital for students’ rapid growth. We actually aim for word lists that are challenging for the student because when she struggles, she has the opportunity to learn.
• After students learn the gist of the game, Switch It should only take 5 minutes/day.

The teachers who work with Marnie over at Reading Simplified rave about this game and I’d love for you to add it to your toolbox.  I’ll link up the site to request the game here on this video and I’ll have it on the show notes if you’re listening to the podcast as well as the episode page BuildMathMinds.com/184 

Another thing I want you to have in your toolbox is a set of games for math time.  There are honestly so many great math games, but my personal favorite is a favorite for one reason: the repeatability.  You can use these games over and over yet slightly change it so that you can do the same (or different content) yet you don’t have to teach a new game every time.  I call them Evergreen Games.  I live in a very forested area that is full of Evergreen trees, so that’s where the name came from.  One of the definitions of evergreen is that it can “describe something that stays fresh or interesting, or that remains relevant over time.”  You can use the same game all year long but it stays fresh & interesting because you switch out the math content within the game.

The download for the Evergreen Games is a Google file that you make a copy of and can edit to change it to any math content you want.  For example, one of the games is Memory. You print off the set of cards, lay them out face down in columns & rows.  Take turns flipping over 2 cards at a time to see if they make a “match.”  If they do match, they keep the cards.  If they do not match, they flip them back over and it is the next player’s turn. Well once kids learn the game of Memory you can change out what’s considered a ‘match’. 

There are 5 Evergreen Games and in the document I give you an example using addition with whole numbers, multiplication, and fractions for each of the games but as I said you can change the math out…which is why I give it to you as a Google file instead of a PDF so you have the templates and can adapt the file to whatever you need throughout the school year.  You can request the Evergreen Games at buildmathminds.com/games or just like the Switch It! game, I’ll link up the page here on this video and I’ll have it on the show notes if you’re listening to the podcast as well as the episode page BuildMathMinds.com/184 

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.