Practice Structures - Old Maid

My goal during the summer is to blog at least once a week.  I've failed pretty miserably with this so far this year.  One of my goals was to blog about my favorite practice structures.  Let's be honest, a lot of the content in high school math is either inapplicable (I'm looking at you polynomial long division) or requires lots of practice to build fluency.  So, although I do like to try to do one project with honest to goodness real world application for each unit or marking period, I still need something engaging to do with kids to help them practice.

The practice structure that I am sharing today is Old Maid.

I love having my kids practice the most basic skills (ones that require little to no writing) by playing card games.  One sad side note is that I usually need to give directions on how to play these games because apparently, parents don't play games with their kids anymore.

So, I just now created a new version of Old Maid for my first unit in algebra 2 for next year.  I googled for directions for the game, an image for my cards, and a worksheet that had the types of problems that I wanted to practice.

Then I opened a powerpoint and went copy/paste crazy, did a little editing, and voila, a new game.

I will use this game at my collaborative station in my hybrid learning classroom. This means that I will need to copy and cut out 3 decks of cards, which is not too bad.  I'll print them in landscape orientation with 4 slides per page.  Then I'll just make 2 cuts down the middle vertically and horizontally.

If you want to know what the heck hybrid learning is, you can read more here, especially the posts dated from 7/3/15-7/9/15.

Here is the finished product.  Enjoy!