Graphing Telephone

 Do you remember the old game of telephone? Someone whispers something to the person next to them and the words get twisted and distorted as they travel from person to person around the circle. The last person shares the phrase they think they heard, and usually everyone shares a chuckle at how ridiculous it ended up. 

A colleague of mine I was working with in my current role as the school's learning coach had the brilliant idea of taking this concept and applying it to graphing functions. We worked together to plan it out and the result was a challenging, and somewhat hilarious, game of graphing telephone! 

For this version, students were grouped into groups of 5. Each person had a little booklet that contained the following pages, with their own unique start card.

Students graphed their function from page 1 on the graph on page 2. Then, once everyone in the circle was ready, they passed their booklet with the graph page showing to the next person in the circle. That student could only look at the graph and use it to write the equation on the next page. They passed it on, where the next person tried to graph it based on the equation. The goal was for the graph at the end to match the original equation. 

Five booklets were passed around the circle and I think the best group all day only had 3 booklets that matched from start to finish. The best and most powerful learning part of the day occurred in the conversations that happened after. Where did we go wrong? What happened? Was it "just" a negative?  How did our absolute value graph turn into a parabola? Such fantastic opportunities to do some error analysis in a really authentic way!

 

Here is an example of a booklet that made it all the way through correctly!

It's always a great day to get students practicing a new skill in a novel way! 

A Little Competition to Increase Participation

 There's a very blurred line between student engagement, participation, and compliance. You start down that rabbit hole and you quickly find that true student engagement is a tough thing to achieve. But somedays, and I hope I am not alone in this, you'd just be happy with whole class participation! Not every day is a student engagement masterpiece lesson, and that's okay! When I start to notice that students are a little down, a little tired, and a little too interested in their cell phones than normal, I like to throw in some fun ways to get kids motivated to participate through a little healthy competition! 

Now, before we talk about two of my favorite easy strategies, I have to first say that I am not a huge fan of games in the classroom that only reward the "smartest" kids who are the fastest at answering. Being a strong mathematician is about more than being fast, especially when content is newer. When the fastest and smartest are the only ones rewarded, I actually find that games can make more students check out then check in. Why participate if Sally is just going to win every time? We all have a Sally. We know who she is. And bless her, as teachers we do love Sally. I was Sally. 

MATHLOVE

I first saw this game at a CPM conference in San Francisco back a few years ago and was wildly confused until I finally tried it in my classroom and saw the simplistic beauty of it. Take a collection of problems you want students to practice solving. You know those days where you just need them to practice a skill and really hammer it home before you can dive into some of the deeper contextual connections that will truly promote student engagement? Yes, those days. 

Have students sit with a partner. They are going to be competing against this partner. 

Each student needs to fill out a MATHLOVE board. Here is my very not fancy version made in a table in Google Docs: 

Direct students to put four 3's, four 2's, four 1's, and four 0's anywhere on their board. When its finished it should look something like this: 

Okay now here is the fun part! Put a problem up on the board or direct students to complete a problem on a worksheet. Everyone works independently on the problem. When students have the answer they circle it on their paper. The circled answer is their final answer. Reveal the answer and have partners check each other to see if they got it correct. 

If they got it wrong, they get 0 points. If they got it correct, they have the opportunity to earn points. How many points? Here is how points are awarded after each problem. 

Create two cups and cut up the letters M-A-T-H in one cup and L-O-V-E in another cup. 

Draw a letter from each cup. Loudly, with lots of gusto and zest, announce the letters chosen. Students, once they know what's going on, will be holding their breath in anticipation. 

"M and V" you announce. The crowd explodes with noise. Chaos breaks out. I love it. Students check their board, and whatever number is at the intersection of the two letters is the number of points they earn for that problem. Students keep track of their points and the "winner" is whatever partner has the most points. 

Things to mention:

1. Some students will get the right answer and still get zero points, leveling the playing field a little for Sally who gets every single one right. Calm down, Sally. She will be very upset about this but that's the game. Her partner, on the other hand, will feel like he still has a chance.

2. Everyone is working on the same problem right now, together, and there is a time limit to get going. There is a sense of urgency to tune in, get started, and start working to get it done in time. 

3. If you throw each problem up one at a time students can't work ahead. I actually love this. Sally would do all of them in 5 minutes. This way as you go over the answer or address whole class misconceptions, everyone is hopefully more tuned in. 

4. It could not possibly be more low prep. Get some problems. Copy a very not fancy table. One you make the cups you can reuse them. It's great on days you need something but don't have time to create, laminate, cut, etc. 

5. Heads up... the first time you try this students will treat the board like a Bingo board and try to cross the numbers off. You could draw A & V multiple times over the course of a game so every single square stays in play the entire time. It's a one time issue and they figure it out pretty quick. 

NUMBER LOTTERY

Want to win the lottery?! Okay not really… And if lotteries or gambling is going to get you a parent email on this one maybe just change the name.

I 100% snagged this idea from a coworker. A win for one of us is a win for all, am I right? Students work in pairs and have a set number of problems to complete (I usually do about 10). Each right answer earns them a lottery number. You'll have to make sure you have enough lottery numbers for every group to claim however many they need. 

After they get a problem or two finished, they check their answers with me for approval and then go up and claim their lottery numbers by writing their initials on the whiteboard. I just ran around the room like a mad woman checking answers and addressing misconceptions with students. I love days where I get to connect one on one or two on one with everyone in the room.

At the end of the period I pulled up a random number generator and selected 10 numbers. Winners for each number got candy and everyone got great practice in for the day. Engagement? Debatable. Depends on the student and the content. But whole class participation and valuable practice time? You bet. 

Colored Coded Review Game

I am always trying to mix it up for review day so that kids never get bored and stay excited about the content. Reviewing can get super boring, super fast so I am continually hunting the depths of the internet for novel and engaging ways to practice. 

I have a hard time with review games that always reward the "smartest" kid. Yes, having the correct answer should be worth something, but I've noticed that game after game after game solely reward the students who have the correct answers in the fastest amount of time. Being fast at math does not mean that a student is good at math. In addition to finding engaging games and activities, I also try to find ways to not always reward those who are correct, but those who are attempting. Here are two of my favorites this past year! 

Capture The Flag: 

Each group starts with a set number of flags of various colors. For this example, students started with 2 green, 2 yellow, and 2 orange. Each flag color is worth a mystery number of points. The teacher poses a question to the class and students work in groups to solve it. I usually designate one white board per group that is the "official" answer. If a group gets it right, they get to steal another group's flag and add it to their flags. At the end of the period the teacher reveals the point values for each color and the group with the most points wins. 

I LOVE this game because getting the answer right is worth a flag and no one "checks out" because they don't know if they have won until the very end. With high school students the stealing of the flag goes pretty well, but I would definitely go over guidelines and expectations ahead of time so that no one gets upset if their flag gets stolen! There was one particular class period this year where we had to have a rotation set up for who steals the flag first because they would always want to be the last group to steal. For the most part, there weren't any issues! 

Try to make the point values spread out enough to where some flags are worth significantly more points than others so that the final outcome is a big surprise! It's always interesting to see the strange strategies kids come up with to try to win. I also switch the winning color up for each period so that kids in the morning can't tell kids in the afternoon how to win! 

Flower Garden:
This game is similar to Capture The Flag but in this variation groups start with nothing. Once a group gets a question right, they come up and choose a colored flower from a large pile of colored flowers and add it to their group's garden. There is no stealing in this variation so it might go better for younger kids or kids who can't handle the stealing aspect.

Just like in Capture The Flag, the point value for each color is revealed at the very end. Some students try to vary the colors in their garden, and others pick a color and commit the entire game. Either way, it's a fun surprise that keeps students participating until the very end! 

The flower garden idea could easily be adapted for the season. For example, October could be ghosts in the graveyard and December could be presents under the tree. The symbols are easy to vary to keep it fresh!  

Leap Froggin'

I am always looking for new and engaging ways to inspire (okay, trick) my students into practicing the mathematics content we are learning. Every day is essentially a new quest for discovering how to get kids to "do" the math with out just giving them another worksheet. 

I am known for throwing out cheesy sports analogies frequently during the year and this particular lesson started with one. I asked kids the following question...

Usually they all start laughing at the thought of their cardigan wearing, logic puzzle dominating, nerdy math teacher trying to play in the NBA. But then we have a discussion about how YOU have to physically get out there and practice the skills in order to be able to do them. Watching someone else do it is not enough. BOOM... Now how will we all practice today students? By playing LEAP FROG! 

I got the idea for this game from one of my favorite blogs Math=Love. Check her original post out here!

Come up with about 10-20 problems you want students to solve. Then, create decks of cards for each student with the answer to each problem on each card. 

Students move their desks into a giant circle and lay out all their cards on their desk. 

Post a question on the board. For our lesson, students were practicing how to write repeating decimals as fractions. 

Students solve the problem on a worksheet (heaven forbid) or on whiteboards (much better for my students). Once they have their answer, they sneakily grab the card with the answer they think it is and hide it behind their whiteboard. 

After a certain amount of time, have students with an answer reveal their card. If they got it correct, they put their card back on the desk, stand up, and move to the next available desk. They might just move one desk, or they might "leap frog" over other students who didn't get the correct answer. 

Continue playing until the first student makes it all the way back to their original desk. 

The students LOVED this game. They asked to play it again the next day. Here are my recommendations for anyone looking to play it this game:

1. Make sure you have created a classroom culture where it is okay to be wrong. This game could be a real confidence killer if your classroom isn't a safe place for errors.

2. Make sure you have a mix of difficulty levels in the problem set so that even struggling students can get some of the problems correct.

3. I think this game is better at the end of a unit as review, not at the beginning of a unit when students are still learning how to do something.

Overall, loved the game and will definitely be playing it again! Just one more way to get students DOING the mathematics instead of just watching me do it!