Play math games! You’ve heard it, but why is playing math games important in the classroom? Are they important at all? I would argue pretty vehemently that games are very important and that you should play them. I had a lot of success teaching math, like the kind that brings recognition, classroom observers, etc….and I played A LOT of games.
Let’s dive right into the reasons playing more games in math would benefit your students!
photo by speech and language pirates
1- Math Games and Math Activities Increase Critical Thinking Usage and Skills
Playing games goes beyond regurgitating facts and algorithms. It requires strategic thinking, different strategies, and a deeper understanding of numbers. When kids are thinking about strategy, the facts they have to compute become background noise to them. They’re practicing things like multiplication or addition facts without focusing on just that. When students practice regurgitation of facts on their own (as in speed drills, etc…) they quickly become bored and disengage. And if those facts are a problem, students will just keep feeling defeated.
“Overemphasizing fast fact recall at the expense of problem solving and conceptual experiences gives students a distorted idea of the nature of mathematics and of their ability to do mathematics” (Seeley 2009, Faster Isn’t Smarter: Messages about Math, Teaching, and Learning in the 21st Century, p. 95).
On the other hand, when students are engaging in games, they are using several behaviors and critical thinking skills that we want them to develop and strengthen.
Just to name a few off the top of my head, educational games promote:
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Multi step problem solving
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Perseverance
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Arguementation
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Abstract reasoning
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Analyzing
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Making predictions
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Maturely critiquing the work of others
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Memory
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Spatial navigation
Students engaged in fun mathematics games are creating a collective and working math knowledge schema, not just memorizing isolated facts
2- Playing Math Games Provides Opportunities for Physical Movement
The amount of brain research out there related to the connection between physical activity and the abilities of students to focus and learn is astounding and has gained quite a bit of attention the last several years. Not only do some students need more physical activity, but the act of moving itself often helps all students make brain connections to what they’re doing while they move. Emotional connections also do this, but I kind of prefer the fun of movement to eliciting strong emotional reactions. Especially since most the research in that area has been done in connection with negative or traumatic emotional connections.
Sometimes playing math games that require full physical movement (such as hopscotching across problems or forming shapes with bodies) can be what a student needs to recall facts or even just pay attention. But even board games can give enough physical movement for students. Just changing locations across the classroom to play as a group, and the acts of rolling dice or turning cards keep students engaged and helps them mentally picture connections they would otherwise have a hard time making.
3- Math Games Provide Opportunities for Social Interaction
Some of my best student improvements in behavior came about because of content games and math activities. As long as you give clear instructions and manage things well, these practice experiences can become everyday math games. Students don’t want to have to stop playing to do ‘book work’, so they’re more likely to follow rules, and they have a chance to practice a lot of social skills. Sometimes with their friends, sometimes with their enemies. Both are life skills and both enhance cooperative learning opportunities.
Naturally entwined into playing games is the ability to practice working well, handling anger, being patient with those who are slower, etc…
Also, math talks are a natural part of game playing. When my fourth graders played math games the natural math conversations I heard going on in the room astounded me! Math talks and math conversations weren’t something I needed to do very often. They became a natural part of the classroom.
4- Playing Math Games Provides Superior Ways to Practice!
When played repeatedly, math games support the development of computational fluency, which is a CCSS for math. I’ll be doing another post in a few weeks about the many ways to integrate more game playing into the classroom. But until then, I’ll remind you that research shows seven spaced repetitions of exposure are needed for someone to truly integrate new information into their long term memory.
Math games give students opportunities to practice over and over without the teacher having to provide problems to answer and without getting bored. This also frees teachers up to make anecdotal observations and assess understanding. Win-win!
5- Independent Practice at a Differentiated Level are Easy to Integrate with Math Games
Not only can some math games be played independently or in like-ability groupings, most math activities are easily adaptable to various levels for differentiation. For example, are you playing fraction war with playing cards? Give students who need a lower level an easier set of cards (maybe 2-5) of a few decks. Give students who need more of a challenge the harder number cards to play with. I usually don’t even have to buy or make different games for differentiation. I just shuffle the available pieces into varying piles.
6- Math Practice Through Games Give Early Finishers Something to do
Often, teachers offer silent reading and journal writing (along with finishing unfinished work) for kids to do when they complete an assignment before everyone is done. I structured my class differently so most still had regular assignments to work on, but I also made a list of things to do for students when they were all the way done with ALL the things. After playing a math game several times (so I knew everyone knew how to play it), I would place it in a set of drawers with other math games. When students were done, they were allowed to play these as one of their options. I noticed students gravitated toward playing math games! Some were independent, some could be playing in pairs or small groups, so long as they remained quiet enough for the rest of the class to keep working. (I was a stickler for this! Good management and consistency with rules is key for integrating a lot of games).
My cart had 10 drawers and each drawer contained several sets of one game. Students could choose which game they wanted to play. When all ten drawers were filled and we introduced a new game, I would take out the one I felt they were most accomplished in and replace it with the new game.
This is very similar to what I used for free choice math game storage.
By offering this as a choice, my students were continually practicing math on a volunteer basis and LOVED having this as an option. It was also an option on rainy days when they couldn’t go outside. The math games were chosen as much as the special activities I had set aside for only those schedules!
7- Playing Math Games Increases Engagement
Not only do kids love to play games vs. filling out worksheets, but students who struggle especially love math games. Which is ironic, because playing a game with a math skill is technically harder than practicing the math skill alone. But it takes a bit of pressure off ‘getting the right answer’ and makes it fun. Students who are engaged and participating have been proven to have better achievement levels. No surprise there!
8- Math Games can Help Build a Stronger School-Home Connection
Some games are easy to send home to practice with a parent or sibling. Parents see what kids are working on and this provides an opportunity for parents to interact naturally with students. Some parents need help with conversations, interactions, and positive moments with their kids. Playing a game related to school can help them with that. They can also see how well their kid is really doing.
I’m sure you know that parent interest and involvement with their child’s education is one of the primary indicators of academic success.
9 – Math Games Help Students Develop a Love for Math
The excitement, the preference for games, the ability most kids have to have a good time playing games even when they lose….these all lead to more positive experiences with math. With the kids that know they’re going to not pass their timed multiplication test every day, it can start to feel like they’re bad at math and they try less and less. But with more positive experiences, they feel more comfortable with resilience and perseverance. They build emotional connections that relate math to fun, not defeat.
10- Productive Struggle is way Better Than Just Struggle
Students who are engaged in math activities and who play math games will struggle. Even if those activities are differentiated. But because they’re more motivated and engaged, they allow themselves more time to struggle, to think through the problem or computation. This helps their brains make stronger connections to the skill they are practicing. So instead of struggling and feeling frustrated, they’re struggling and having fun.
11- Playing Games Provides Chances to Practice With Less Anxiety
Students who get nervous every time you have a math lesson feel less anxiety while playing games and engaging in math activities. Not only does it feel more fun, but it doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as the worksheet that can get marked up and graded. Even though games actually require more skill on the behalf of the student because they’re combining knowledge and strategy and more steps, students just feel less pressure. This is important, not only for the students who are struggling with the math skills themselves, but also your little guys with social anxiety.
I’ll close with this quick story. One day early in my career, while students had a chance to play math games (a fourth grade division game to be exact), a struggling student came up just to tell me that he would look forward to math every day if he could practice this way (referring to game playing). It melted my heart because this was a student who struggled. Then I started watching him and I noticed a change in him over time from that point, about two months in to the school year, and several months beyond, as we came in from recess, which is when I did math. He arrived more open every day.
Before that day I hadn’t really connected the attitudes of my students when they arrived in the classroom to the subject we were about to learn. I kind of figured if they came in with a bad attitude it was because of an interaction at recess. And that’s still the case a lot. But I started looking for patterns before language arts, math, science, etc….and every year I could pick out a few kids who arrived at different times of the day with a little more anxiety than the rest of the day. That was a major shift for me in my view of students, their anxiety, and the importance of games. Until that time, I was just trying to keep learning fun while still making sure it was focused where it needed to be. This particular year, using math games to practice skills, and subsequently using more games in other topics, shifted from being fun and purposeful, to being necessary. Still fun and purposeful, but also essential.
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