Tutoring Session Success!

Yesterday was a better day with my tutoring kids at the Boys and Girls Club! I found this game online through Teachers Pay Teachers called "Snowball!" and I decided to play it with them. They had a blast and it gave me a chance to see what they knew and did not as far as their computations skills.

A brief summary of the game: You have three dice and you can choose the level of difficulty to challenge your students. There are 3 different levels:

 Snowball 100 requires students to roll 2 dice and add the totals until they reach 100. The “twist”? If they roll doubles, they need to SUBTRACT that amount.

Snowball 200 requires students to roll 3 dice and add the totals until they reach 200. The “twist”? If they roll “3 in a row”, they have to dthe total
(ex. 3,4,5 or 1,2,3)

Snowball 300 requires students to roll 3 dice, add two, and multiply by the third until they reach 300. The “twist”? If they roll “3 in a row”, they have to subtract the total
(ex. 3,4,5 or 1,2,3)

I chose to do the Snowball 300 and the students had a blast! Throughout the game, I got a chance to test their multiply skills, their addition and subtraction skills and their understanding of positive and negative integers. I will definitely be playing this game again!

The Constitution

Short post today. I was in a middle school classroom on Monday and the class had to answer some simple questions about a few charts and tables about religions in North America. The final question was: "How does the diversity of religious groups in North America reflect the values of the American People and the principles of the U.S. Constitution?"

Out of 6 classes, only 1 student was able to answer the question without any prompting from me. It was amazing! Most of the students had no clue what the constitution was or what it said. Not sure what to make of this but what do you say?

When should we teach our children about the Constitution? Do you what the constitution says?  Post your idea in the comments.