"Don't Get the Red Dot!"

At this point in the school year, I always love introducing math games as part of our comprehensive math program in our classroom! Respecting the fact that developing a classroom community takes time, patience, routine-building and established expectations, I wanted to share one of my favourite math games from last year that was a student "favourite" and one that promoted strong skills when acquiring early number concepts!

We have yet to introduce this math game to our students in our classroom this year, but look forward to seeing them build upon their numeracy skills and acquire new strategies for being the incredible mathematicians that they are in the coming weeks.  

The title itself says it all: "Don't get the RED dot!"

Purpose: 
For students to build upon their subitizing (the ability to recognize the number of objects at a glance, without having to count all the objects), one-to-one correspondence (each object being counted must be given one count and only one count. The number word spoken and the object counted must match up), and hierarchical inclusion (numbers build by exactly one each time and nest within each other by this amount. This relationship means that the child mentally includes one in two, two in three, three in four, and so on) skills as early mathematicians in a fun and engaging way!

Materials:
- Each student is given a ten-frame board to play on. Counters can include any type of open-ended material/loose part (e.g. corks, coloured counters, marker caps, gems, etc). 
- Create number cards 1-10 and dot cards also 1-10 on blank playing cards
- Include one card with a red dot

 How to play:
- Each player takes a turn picking a card, naming the number (e.g. by recognizing the numeral and/or counting the dots) and then everyone showing what that number looks like on their ten-frame board
- Continue taking turns and showing each number on students'  ten-frame boards until someone picks the red dot card! This means the game is over! The object of the game is to not get the red dot! 

Encourage students to compose and decompose numbers to 10 by adding and taking away counters as the numbers change.

Here is one of our previous SK students explaining how the game works with a few twists:

This is an incredibly fun game and one that capitalizes on students' prior knowledge around numbers and build upon their understanding of those important early number concepts! 

Enjoy and remember...don't get the red dot!!

Here is an incredible reference sheet that explains the Early Number Concepts created by the York Region District School Board. I refer to this chart daily:

Early Number Concepts YRDSB by jocelynschmidt