We started small groups in our 8th grade classroom, recently, and after their rotations of centers the students get 10-15 minutes to play a math game of their choice. We have a few card games and dominoes, some puzzles and 1 iPad. Not surprisingly, I noticed the iPad is chosen first. After the first week of small groups I took some time to amp up the math choices of games in the iPad. The students seemed to enjoy working on the iPad but the games were too far below their grade level.
I learned about the zondle app in my Middle School Math class at NLU and I explored some of the games that aligned with the standards the students were learning in our class. I found some inaccurate questions and some really great questions in the zondle database. I sorted through the questions and assigned the ones I liked to a game inside the zondle app which rewards the students for answering questions correctly. When I brought this game to some students during their choice time, they were so into the activity. I had 2 students who are usually distracted and not active participants in class discussions so excited about correctly identifying operations of exponents in order to play cow cakes. It was awesome. These kids didn't know they were improving their exponent operation fluency, they were tricked into learning under the disguise of a game. I can't wait to find more games to help my students become excellent middle school mathematicians!
Zondle has a huge database of questions that cover all disciplines of education. I look forward to finding more ways to incorporate it into the curriculum.
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