I teach math, 6th grade up through Geometry. I try to make it fun. The following are games I’ve made up, or adapted from commercially available versions, for use in my classroom. Feel free to play/ use/ further adapt these to suit your own needs, and check out http://www.incentivesforlearning.com/cat569_1.htm for the real QuizmoTM games.

GEOMETRY SIMON SAYS

Develop an agreed-upon set of physical gestures to represent the vocabulary terms you have studied:

etc., etc. Students all stand up; the teacher or leader calls a vocabulary term, simultaneously making one of the gestures, but not necessarily the one that goes with the term. Students must respond with the correct gesture, or else they’re out and have to sit down. Continue until you have only one person still standing; that person becomes the leader in the next round. This is particularly fun if the teacher is NOT the leader, and makes the wrong gestures, because a good many of the students usually try to copy the teacher’s gesture.

AROUND THE WORLD

We play this with flash cards to improve speed of recall; we usually use multiplication or division cards, but it would work on any level. Students sit in a circle, or around a table. The teacher or leader sits where the players can see hir. One student, the challenger, gets up and stands behind the person to hir right. The teacher holds up a flashcard; the student (of those two) who gives the correct answer first advances to challenge the person in the next seat. Students can only give one answer; if someone blurts out the wrong answer, the other person has as much time as sie needs to think of the correct response. The challenger continues until sie makes a mistake, at which point sie takes the seat of the person she was competing with, and that person continues around the circle. When a student has advanced around the circle back to hir original seat (either in one turn or over the course of the game, depending on circumstances), sie is the winner. Any number of people can win; this game can go on for an indefinite amount of time.

QUIZMO (overview)

Based on the commercially available QUIZMOTM games; a form of math BINGO. Variations abound; basically each student is given a playing board consisting of a 4x4 or 5x5 blank grid (each square is 1-2” on a side, so the board fits on an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper) which sie fills in with possible answers from a given pool. The teacher or leader calls math problems which the students then solve, covering the correct answer space on their boards using slips of paper or small chips (so that the boards are re-usable). When we play, there is no FREE SPACE in the center of the board, but there are two winners per game—the first two people to cover a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row on their playing boards.

FRACTION / DECIMAL / PERCENT QUIZMO

Students fill in the spaces on their 4x4 boards with the following percentages (in random order): 33 1/3%,   66 2/3%,  25%,   75%,  10%,  20%,  30%,   40%,   50%,   60%,  70%,  80%,  90%,   100%,  16 2/3%,   83 1/3%,  12.5%,   37.5%,   62.5%,  87.5%.   (there are more percents listed than spaces on the board, so not every student will have every answer on hir board); The teacher’s cards have the corresponding fractions (1/3,   2/3,   ¼,  etc.) and decimals (.33…,  .66…,  . 25,   etc.) on them.

VARIABLE QUIZMO

Each 5x5 board is printed with a key (for the sake of example, lets say A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, etc.) Students fill in the spaces on their 5x5 board with the numbers 1 - 25 (in random order). The question cards are printed with problems involving variables:     CB,     A + B,     A x D,    etc. whose answers are the numbers 1 through 25.

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I don’t think this is quite what Rancid_Pickle had in mind, but these games have been brought to you courtesy of Everything Quests: Games and Distractions (see also Battleship).

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