Dice, Addition, Graphing & Shhhh! He's Doing His Math!

Shhh! My 7 year old doesn't know he's doing his math, please don't tell him! lol Oh, this is great.

What are we doing? I made a simple table using Microsoft Word with 11 columns and 20 or so rows and numbered it at the bottom from 2 to 12. The kids each have a copy of this table and a set of dice. They're rolling their two dice together, adding those numbers, finding the sum on the table, charting it, then rolling again. This has been keeping them content and busy now for a good 5 minutes. They'll keep rolling and charting until one of the numbers reaches the top! I got so excited to see my son having fun with math (shh!) that I had to step over to my computer and tell you all about it! Took a couple shots of the game in action as things started really getting exciting.

Oh, he didn't want to do math today, so I told him he could wait until later. He doesn't seem to realize that this is his math for the day. Before this activity I had him and his little sister see how many squares they could draw on a piece of paper in 100 seconds. Then they had to go back and count them, while placing the number of the square in each box. That was a good exercise too and no one complained a bit. This morning I made up a few silly songs about numbers and we practiced multiplication. Oh, I'm sorry... can't share that with you. Maybe I can find someone who can sing... but until that happens you'll have to write your own songs! lol

This is very basic math mind you. I realize that the largest sum he'll reach is 12, but it's still good practice for a 7 year old. Not a bad exercise for a 5 1/2 year old either! Still, I may need to get fancier dice for future games. I've actually seen dice with larger numbers and more than 6 sides. Pretty cool!

Updating as I finish this post to say that they kept at the dice rolling for about 12 minutes and then had to take a break. Short attention spans yes, but hey... they both did about 70 math problems in that amount of time!