Finding Doubles

First grade teachers asked second grade teachers to come into a Teacher Meeting a couple of weeks ago and let them know what things they really need to work on for the last nine weeks of first grade. One of the things that second grade teachers identified was that children coming into second grade needed to have fluency with doubles (e.g., 2+2=4, 3+3=6). They wanted to make sure that the children know the doubles and know them quickly. That led our Standards Coach, Suzanne Shall, to teaching us four new Math games at the next Teacher Meeting to meet the expectations of the second grade teachers.

"Finding Doubles" is a game taken from Catherine Towmey Fosnot's Games for Early Number Sense. According to the rules two can play. The game has a "board" that can be a piece of paper with even numbers. A deck of number cards is turned down. A player takes the top card and doubles the number. On the game board, the player covers the double with a chip. Then the other player draws and they continue until all the even numbers are covered. Once a number is covered, it can't be covered again. The winner is the one with the most numbers covered. Watch students play the game.

How can you make this game more difficult? Another task that second grade teachers wanted children to work on was doubles, plus or minus one. In other words they wanted children to know that 6+6= 12 and then minus 1 is 11 and plus 1 is 13. The way to make "Finding Doubles" more difficult is to use the same number cards but change the game board adding numbers from 3 to 21. Then as each player turns over a card, he can choose to cover the double, add or take away one so that he can cover numbers that aren't already covered on the game board.