Math Minute {Practicing Place Value}

Two things coincided to make me buy Monopoly Millionaire recently...first, lots of moms were talking about playing it with their homeschooled kids because it must have been a hot game this Christmas. Secondly, I10 was having trouble with place value in large numbers.

So, I thought...why not try to play and we can talk about numbers in the hundreds of thousands with zeros all over the middle! That will help.

I have several Monopoly purists in the house, but this is a quick game to play and fits the bill for practicing with large numbers.

We've been working with place value in long division problems and that throws my fifth grader for a loop sometimes...the quotient with the zeroes in the middle. You know the ones.

Here are a few other resources for place value fun:

Interactive Math Journal- this is a nice little notebooking packet for math journaling. She has some place value activities in here.

Family Math- has several games involving place value and estimating, money, and digit value

Math on the Level- Money & Decimals Manual has a lot of ideas for teaching students large number place value.

Do you have any ideas for teaching large number place value? Feel free to share them in the comments below!

Math Play

Have you played with math lately? I like to play math with my kids at least once a week! Sometimes it's a commercial game and other times it's one that I've made up- I just knew I could find all kinds of math play using number chips.

I've posted on math games before...makes me think it would make a great math page to link to. But, I thought about now some of you might be looking to for a little math boost. Listed below are some of our favorites: (This is not an exhaustive list, if I find more I will add to the pile!)

• Set- what a great way to practice visual discrimination. In searching for a link, I came across this daily online Set Puzzle. How cool is that?
• Equate- pictured above it's a math Scrabble game, but way harder than Smath. This is a great game when you combine getting the highest score
• Sumuko- super game to practice multiples
• Labyrinth- this one requires thinking ahead and planning and seeing moves a few out which I'm terrible at!
• Yahtzee- this one requires math to score and see who wins! It's also a fun way to practice patterns and identifying sets
• Math Dice- mental math fun and there are two versions. Check out the Math Dice Junior as well.
• Zingo- for the younger set
• Corners- fun little card game from the RightStart card games

Last spring I taught a math co-op class and it was fun to play math games each week. One thing I found is that although the "math wise" kids knew a lot of math facts fast, they had trouble with strategy. We worked on that throughout the semester. 

I know many of us are tempted to think of games as the icing on the cake with not a lot of substance compared to solving problems and finishing those math book pages, but I encourage you to think of math games as more nutritious and to make sure your children get more servings! Math games help kids to solve problems in a unique way and help to develop a more creative approach to problem solving.

Conversion: Missionaries of the Middle Ages Game

One of the projects E13 worked on during his year with the Middle Ages was a game. He opted out of the suggested projects from WinterPromise and created this game which is all about Missionaries of the Middle Ages.

The object of the game is to convert your area to Christianity by creating converts, churches, monks, and monasteries. You must collect resources during the game in order to achieve these goals.

He made the board with a Bare Book board and maps printed from the Uncle Josh's map CD.

He chose missionaries that he studied and got the images from the History through the Ages Timeline figure CD from Homeschool in the Woods. We laminated them and I helped to cut them out- there were so many resource cards, we all helped!

In order to convert or do other actions, you must have a set of criteria like prayer, empathy, etc. Some ways are of converting are more full proof than others. Usually do so by force doesn't work out.

These are the situation cards that give you the chance on how to convert the people you come across.

These are the choice you can make.

These are the solutions to the choice you made. These tell you how many converts you get or what else happens.

Not only did it earn a blue at the county fair, but it was chosen to go to State Fair!

We played the game to check its playability and E13 was making a list of changes he needs to make to the rules. We need to start with more resources for sure!

The game is on the way to the Great NY State Fair the week after next and he's excited to see how it does. His last game: The Truth about New York was a Monopoly/Trivia game about NY and it got a blue at state fair. Either way, this game is a gem. Great job E13!

Spring for a Day!

If you live anywhere on the east coast of the US, then you know that yesterday was a pretty nice day! Even here in NY it was 62 degrees on March 7th which is pretty cool. I decided it was time to get out for the day and have some fun- especially given we've been hard at work on our house (we listed on Monday!).

We spent the afternoon at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Here's a peek at our fun time! (pardon the cell phone pictures- I broke the memory card for our Canon)

Lots of birds are back in town. It was fun to hear all the chatter there yesterday. Check out this terrible picture of a great blue heron its nest. Yes, that's him there standing on the nest.

After we had walked a while we sat for some reading- R11 pulled out her sketch easel (home made) and made some drawings.

This is one of five books we have going right now for read alouds- We started Swallows and Amazons yesterday. We are looking forward to some really fun summer adventure with this one! We stopped and read this for a bit while out and about on the trail.

Then it was back to walking...I9 was our navigator and chose a new route.

J6 loved seeing the changes in the wetlands- still some ice down there, but it is fast fading already. For the moment. I keep thinking winter is going to come in earnest at some point. I guess maybe not this year.

Hi friend! We must have seen 20-30 red winged blackbirds in the trees on an island near the observatory. This is my very favorite bird call- what says spring and summer more than the red-winged black bird call? Go ahead and hit that link to have a listen.

At home we followed with a game of Equate- great math game.

All in all, it was a great homeschooling day! Over the next 24 hours we'll be back to weather reality for a NY March, but it was a fun day of spring for us.

I'm going to spend the next long while focusing on our school and having a good time with the kids. It's long over due after a month of preparing our house to sell.  I'll be able to step up the blogging along with that. I already have some posts to share!

The Game Jar

If you've been reading a while, then you know that we are a big game playing family. Really big. We've been known to fill a hat with game names and to pull to see what we'll play next...takes me right back to a rainy Fourth of July- long games of Catan, and Chinese food.

So, when I saw "The Summer List" idea at Good + Happy Day, I knew right away how I'd adapt it to a game challenge.

We have a lot of games and to make sure we play them all, we'll pull from the jar. This may end some inevitable squabbles over what we'll play at any given time and it'll be a fun school time activity as well...I can even modify the jar to hold a specific set of games. So Clever.

Painting the sticks was a load of fun and I even pulled our fun paint additives to try- we used shimmer additive and glitter additive to the paints. I'm a huge fan of the shimmer. Huge.

How do you all make sure you use the resources you have at home? 

The Monopoly Bag

My pal Cindy gifted me with this great bag for my birthday. Our MOPS pal Susan made them this year for our MOPS theme which is MOMSense...with a board game motif. She made lots of these for our MOPS teams. They come in Scrabble and Candyland too. Who can resist?

Makes you just want to play!

Love me a bag with a pocket!

This is a great bag for taking games on the road. We do that a lot around here. My friend Susan has a little sewing business called Sew What Now. Hop on over to make an order or to see what else she has going on.

On the Go...

Well I'm sure most of us can identify with a busy schedule as we've gotten back to our fall routines. Around here we aim to keep things as low key as possible, but with four children that doesn't always happen. Here's a peek at some things we've been doing while I9 plays out his soccer season (oh and one orthodontist appt was thrown in there). We only have one more practice tomorrow (Wednesday) and Saturday is the final tournament. So, things are winding down for soccer...

My kids had no problem removing the magazines off one of the orthodontist's tables to play a game.

A little Spill and Spell- after a while they had turned the board on its side and were launching the cubes into the cup at the end.

We take art supplies just about everywhere. They were working on fall colors from the HBNS blog.

Somehow artwork on a blanket at a sporting event always draws a big crowd of young spectators...J6 was noting the blue sky around his colorful leaves.

I made sure to provide the fall color palette for reference- this is from the FIAR Fall Nature Study (one of my favorite nature studies of all time)

What else have we been up to this fall? Weekly Co-op, FIRST LEGO League (updates on that coming soon), Sewing Camp, and E13 just finished hunter safety with Dan- another step on the road to his falconry license. The older kids also volunteer at the Salvation Army with Dan to serve a lunch meal on the first Saturday of the month. So, things are busy but thankfully FLL isn't really going to hit high gear until after soccer is finished.

How are things going at your house with a busy routine?

The Game Streak

As most of you know, we are big gamers. We've decided to start a game streak. We haven't completely decided on all the parameters to make our challenge, but we do know we'll be playing at least one game a day. But that's the thing. We probably already do that...so we have to tweak it some! We'll officially start the streak during our camping vacation this week (another scheduled post) and to do so we've packed Dominion, our card game box, travel Catan, and travel Scrabble. We're hoping for a great week!

E12's New York State game- it plays pretty well

Ocean-Opoly- great fun and trivia

Super Deluxe Scrabble...the two oldest and Dan and I played the other night over a few days. Great game. I especially like the raised board for securing tiles.

Why not consider some sort of activity streak at your house? What would you like to try? Time with our children is always a good investment!

The Card Game Box

Continuing with our game storage boxes, I thought I'd share our new "card game box". These IKEA boxes are just right for consolidating games. When you are a big gaming family like we are, with limited storage space, it's important to think about what's going to happen with all those game boxes! So far, this is a great solution for us. But, you have to be able to part with the original boxes which makes some folks nervous. Also, it sorta kills the resale value I suppose. It's a risk worth taking around here.

I asked the kids to bring out our card games and this was the start. I mean if we could put all those Dominion cards in a box. Why not the regular little games?

Here we are so far, the directions can just sit on top of the box.

R11 helped to make dividers out of index cards. And she took a lovely picture, no?

But I knew we had way more card games than that! Look at all the room I attempted to save! Would card Catan fit in the box? Ticket to Ride card game?

Indeed they do! In the end, we have 15 card games plus a deck of regular cards in our IKEA box. I know we have another Scrambled States card game, but if we find it it might still fit. This doesn't work for cards that are over sized obviously, so test it before you chuck the boxes!

Closed box- I even pulled out my label maker. It's a little scary to throw out the game boxes, but I think the space saving is worth it.

Is this fabulous, or what? I'm excited to be able to take one box and have so many games. This will be great for camping for example and we have a week-long trip next week. Now the directions have become an issue. The Catan card games have huge booklets for directions, so I couldn't fit them into the top of the box. So, I have a 3 prong folder which has the directions to all the games we've transferred to the boxes. After all, the Dominion directions were too wide for the box. I think it works to have them all in one place. I remain convinced this is a great move for us.

I have one more box to share and one box to spare- for our gaming needs into the future!

Carcassonne Game Storage

I've been really busy just organizing games like crazy. Next up was Carcassonne. We have the original game plus three expansions. We'll have room for more in the box easily.

We already had the game and expansions in one box, but you know how boxes fail. Plus, we couldn't easily separate the expansion tiles from the whole batch.

Each compartment holds two rows of tiles and we can put the bag for grabbing tiles in its own spot. What's nice too is that we keep the starter tile separate from the rest.

Carcassonnne is a fun game of building. You have to match tiles and it reminds me some of Rivers, Roads, and Rails only with a middle ages twist and point gathering components. RRR has too many tiles or I'd throw that in this box too.

The kids thought our Castle Keep game would fit nicely with Carcassonne. Don't worry...there's still room for expansions for Carcassonne!

One of the things I really like about these boxes, in addition to just making less boxes to store, is that we can grab one box and have a lot with us when we are on the go. This has been fun! Do you all remember my game storage consolidation from last summer? These boxes are for games with no boards, but that link will take you to another solution. Enjoy!

Dominion Storage

Our family is totally hooked on the game Dominion. Have you played? Friends of ours from church, who are also big gamers, gave us a storage box from IKEA that really fit the bill for replacing the large boxes. We were going along ok until one of the kids had a spectacular fall which resulted in crushing one of the boxes. After that, it was time to take action. I called upon a MOPS Field Leader friend of mine living in PA to do some personal shopping for me to get more of these IKEA boxes- they don't ship them. But I was on a quest, so I called in a big favor. Let me take a moment to give a shout out to Mrs. B's husband for going to the mat for me! Not only do I love to organize, but Mrs. B is known for her streamlining which caused her to save herself a trip and ask her husband to drop by IKEA on the way home one night. Thanks Mr. B!

Prosperity...lots of cards to move! Can it be done well? Can I leave the boxes behind?

Seaside also has plenty of cards and a few coins and larger cards

I took the original storage sheet and cut the names of the cards and taped them to index cards. I folded the index cards and slipped the Dominion set in there. Not ideal, but it works. It might just mean a bit of fumbling now and then.

The before shot- we had four of these large game boxes loaded with cards. That blue box is from another project. Stay tuned!

Prosperity and Seaside fit really well into this box leaving room for the last two expansions...

Dominion and Intrigue fit well in here without a bunch of extra room. So, all four games plus room for the last two expansions in TWO boxes. Nicely done.

I finished a few more consolidation projects I'll share with you as well. We certainly trimmed down the amount of storage space we need for the game and now we can just grab a box or two and have a whole lot of game with us! What could be better?

Game Time: Dominion!

A new game for us since Christmas, Dominion is well loved and frequently played. Amazon.com reviews are correct- the game is addicting! We can all play this one with varying amounts of experience and success. I like that the game changes depending upon what you choose for actions as you set up the game.

Essentially, without a lot of interactive cards, you are playing against the deck and you are trying to amass a lot of cards and particularly a lot of victory points. The person who has the most- wins!

It really is a card game and there are many choices to make for the action cards you will play that game.

Our two newest editions are Prosperity, Intrigue and Seaside! Don't forget you need to buy the basic Dominion game as well.

Seaside lets you have tokens for victory points and duration cards which allow the benefit to linger to your next turn. Pretty cool.

One of the things I LOVE about this game is that it really is a different game each time you play depending on the cards you choose to play with that round. Having caboodles of expansions means we can pick lots of different cards which changes the game strategy. Of course, as our mathematician friend explains, once you know how certain powerful cards play, if they are in the game then you know what to do. It appears we are missing just two (one is a brand new version) small expansions and as luck would have it another birthday coming in September. This summer we are trying to achieve a game streak, but we have not yet decided on the parameters. One different game each day? Just a game of our choice each day? Two games a day? So many possibilities...