Math Drama Games

This month, we are working on incorporating Math into our drama time (for more info on What drama time is, see these posts #1, #2, #3).  I know it sounds strange...but since most of my kids dislike math, we decided, why not try and make math more fun?!  WE are having a special guest (Mr. John from Red Kite!) come to help us this month.  My students love it when he comes because he brings his guitar and has lots of fun new ideas to spice up our regular drama time!


We started with a game called Zip Zap Zop.  Each kids has to look at another kid (working on eye contact).  We started by just going around in a circle.  The first kid looks at the person sitting next to them, claps their hand, and says "1."  Then the next kid has to look at the person sitting next to them, clap, and say "2" until you get all the way around the circle.  Next, we played where you have to look at someone across the circle.  This helps work on attending skills, because students who are waiting their turn have to watch the person who has the "clap."  It also works on counting and attending in order to keeping track of which number we are on.  When someone messes up, we make a buzzer noise and start over.

Another game we played was "present" (see this post).  In this version of present, you had to give the number of items you found in your gift box.

We also had the kids (silently) line up in order from tallest to smallest.  We also had them line up in order of birthdays.  This required a lot of help from us...but I think the overall activity was a great one!  It helps give them a visual representation of the terms "tall" and "small."

A new game we added involved "more" and "less."  These are super hard concepts for my kids!  I made a bunch of pictures of gross things and good things.  These were meant to be things the kids would want "less of" and "more of."  We held up a card and asked the kids if they wanted "more or less?"  Some gross things were dirty diapers, dirty socks, puke, and toilets. 

Some things kids could want more of would be playdoh, chips, 2 M&Ms, and 2 Chocolate Chips.

Some trickier things were the hamburgers.  Most of the kids love hamburgers, but they definitely don't need 15 of them.  We discussed this would be one to say we want "less" of.  Same thing with scissors...you may need 1 pair, but not 9 pairs.  These were great ones to use for a little more discussion!

And last, but certainly not least(!), Mr. John brought in his guitar and sang this great counting song in Spanish and English.  A lot of my students speak Spanish at home (and the rest of my kids think other languages are really cool), so this was a great one for our class!  I made it into a little video (and I'm sure it took me way too long to make something so simple, but this is my first experience with iMovie!).