Friday, June 25, 2010

domino math

This is one of my favorite math activities. It's a really good one for working on number sentences. Bee is really coming along with her math work, but while working on this, I realized that she was really missing some number sentence basics.

So at some point, I made all these large dominoes. We also used pages I had made up years ago to record our number sentences. They drew their domino dots in the boxes and then wrote out a number sentence to show the addition of the two sides.

The oldest friend used the double 16 set for her sentences.

The two younger girls used the paper set I had made. Lou just drew on the dots on his page and counted the dots. He says he is very good at drawing circles.

Immediately following our math lesson, we had a pretty good domino run on the kitchen floor. Maybe sometime we'll learn the game Mexican Train. My grandma taught me that one.

When I used this in the classroom, I've had students make up a math games using dominoes and let them work in partners. They have come up with some really creative games. You could also make some problem solving stories using dominoes. I suppose you could use them to help make multiplication number sentences too, although it lends itself best to addition.

2 comments:

grandma said...

I have tried to leave comments but sometimes it doesn't seem to work. It is the user not the system. I think I will write out the directions for Chicken foot dominoes. The kiddos would probably like that better than Mexican train. It goes quickly.

Anonymous said...

I was very good at making circles when I was in kindergarten. I drew "piles" of circles and Grandma asked why. I told her that it was because they were snowballs ready for a snowball fight.

Love Always,
Dad