Integers Game

I played a great game today with the kids in my class to introduce them to integers. I did it at the beginning of class and didn't even tell them the topic was integers. The basis of the play is taken from the old board game stock ticker. The basic play is using three dice to move stock up and down. For my game I used a 4 sided dice, a dice with with arrows, a 6 sided dice, a 10 sided dice and a 20 sided dice. On the board I had a graph style layout with the team names at the top (I let them choose) and then along the y-axis I had the board numbered from -10 at the bottom to 10 at the top. Everyone starts at zero. I put the kids into four teams and started the game. For the first few rounds I used the 4d, arrow dice and 6d. The 4d would tell me the team, the arrow would tell me up or down (pointing towards me was down, away from me was up) and the 6d was how far up or down they went. I started off rolling and then went around to groups to let them each member of the team roll. It got pretty loud but fortunately I had a headset microphone to use. I told them the first team that got to 10 would win some candy. Fortunately no one won right off the start. We went a number of round with no winner so I told them we were raising the stakes. I switched the d10 in for the d6. After a few more turns we were getting close to the end of class so I switched out the d20 for the d10 and had each group roll one more time regardless if a group reached 10. At this point I had the d20 rolled first, then the arrow then the group to build suspense. It was a lot of fun. The best part was when the kids were calling out the numbers they moved up or down to because I was too "slow". The team that won really enjoyed the candy too.

cheers