Yes/No Game with Numbers

A simple premise, and very adaptable. Plus it gives us a nice opportunity to get up and get moving!

Here's how it goes:

• Label one area (e.g. one side of the classroom) with "Yes" and another area with "No"
• Give each student a number.
• Ask yes/no questions about the numbers.
• Students have to go to the correct area, holding their number where you can see it to check.

For example, today I played this with my Peer Numeracy roll call (which was extra good because it was a small group and the year 10 mentors helped check and helped the students who struggled). First I did numbers in the hundreds, then in the thousands.

Some questions:

• Are you even?
• Are you more than 50?
• Are you more than 400?
• Look at your tens digit. Is your tens digit more than 3?
• Look at your hundreds digit. Is your hundreds digit odd?
• Add up your digits. This is your digit sum. Is your digit sum even?

And so on. At the end of each set of questions, I got them to line up in ascending order and collected the numbers and gave out the new numbers.

I've also played as revision with year 7 classes, looking at number properties and special numbers, using questions like:

• Are you odd?
• Are you prime?
• Are you a multiple of 3?
• Is 4 a factor of you?
• Are you palindromic?
• Are you a square number?
• Are you a triangular number?
• Are you in the Fibonacci sequence?
• If you add 3 to yourself, are you a multiple of 5?

Some other ideas:

• Use decimal numbers and ask questions about the digits in certain places, to reinforce place value
• Use fractions and ask questions about the numerator and denominator (to reinforce those terms)
• Use algebraic terms and ask about "are you a like term to ...?" or "is .... a factor of you?"
• Give students shapes and ask questions about their properties

This also makes me think about getting students into groups for group work. Some ideas:

• Give students algebraic terms and get them to form groups in their like terms
• Give students numbers and get them to form groups of multiples
• Give students shapes and get them to find the same type of shape

Multiples Pig

When I was at high school, we played a lot of card games. A lot. All the time.

Pig was one I had forgotten about, until I was reintroduced to it by some students as Spoons. A good description of the game can be found here.

In Pig the aim is to get four of a kind. In Multiples Pig, the aim is to get 4 numbers that are all multiples of the same number (not including one, and I usually disallow twos as well).

All you need are some number cards. Here are some that go from 3 to 50 that work quite well:



My basic summary of the rules:

• Players sit in a circle
• Deal 4 cards to each player
• The rest of the deck is to the right of one player
• That player picks up from the deck then discards to their left
•  The next player picks up from those discards and discards to their left and so on. So each player picks up from their right, discards to their left.
• There are no 'turns', play continues as quickly as the players can play
• The first player to create a hand of 4 multiples puts their hand on their nose
• Anyone who notices this can also put their hand on their nose
• The last player to put their hand on their nose 'loses' (loses a life, gets a letter of the word pig, etc.)
• Shuffle, deal and play again!

The best part of pig is the subtle silent waiting for the last person to notice!

Day 15: The Twelve Days of Christmas

The Twelve Days of Christmas. It's full of mathematical opportunities.

• For primary school kids, you can focus on the numbers - drawing pictures of the gifts, using either the original version or an Australian version. Maybe the kids could come up with twelve days of gifts on another theme and illustrate those.

• Find the total number of presents given over the twelve days. This opens up a lot of potential for strategies for adding lots of numbers and looking for patterns.

• Or, use it as an exercise to learn the basics of formulas in Excel.

• The daily gift totals are triangular numbers. I find students forget triangular numbers easily (even though... they make a triangle... seems straightforward to me) so another opportunity to discuss them is good. Since they make a triangle, they can become a Christmas tree, or a Santa hat... is there anything else triangular at Christmas?

• The presents also relate to the numbers in Pascal's triangle, as this exploration shows (and Pascal's triangle also makes a Christmas tree...). I imagine drawing up a big Pascal's triangle and putting it up somewhere, then moving on to a Twelve Days activity, working out the numbers. Then ask the kids if they can see those numbers anywhere in the room....

• Check out Vi Hart's Christmath Special video for some other funny and interesting ideas. You could put up the numbers from 1 to 12 and get your kids to come up with interesting things about that number and make their own song.

Incursion to the Mural

Today year 7 were looking at various groups of special numbers. So I took the opportunity to take them to the corridor outside the Maths staffroom and show them the mural.

They moved in groups around in front of the columns to work out what the pattern or type of numbers was (odd, even, square, triangular, Fibonacci and prime)

 

I also pointed out the factor tree, since we had had a discussion the previous lesson about whether or not they actually looked anything like trees.

 
Then we went back to the classroom to write up some notes on the new ones they had worked out (Fibonacci and triangular) and learn some more (Pascal's triangle and Palindromic numbers). After all the time and effort that we spent on it was lovely to finally use it in a lesson!