Math Fact Practice

We are halfway through the year already!  Some students are really picking up speed on their timed math tests and have been moving forward steadily.  I'd like to thank those parents who help their kids with math fact practice-it makes a difference.  Students should be through their adding tests and working on subtracting.  I've paired struggling students up with some of the math whizzes in class to work together on some fun math games to improve automaticity.  One game we played as a class is called Switch! It's actually a version of the game Snoop, if you're familiar with that.  Students played in groups of four.  Each had a set of cards - two through queen.  Students took turns rolling a pair of dice. They added them, and flipped over the corresponding card.  They can keep rolling until they can't flip over any more cards, then it's the next player's turn.  The first person in the whole room who flips over all of their cards yells, "Switch!"  Everyone stops and adds up their remaining face-up cards and writes the total on a scorecard.  The person who yelled switch gets to switch seats with anyone they want.  We played five rounds.  At the end, students added up all five totals - great practice for adding up two-digit numbers.  The overall winner was the person with the least amount of points.  Kids LOVED this game and it was great practice at adding quickly.