Friday Game Day.... Tower Addition

I hope you've had a great week... I can't believe it's Friday again!

I might have chosen (ok... did choose!) this game because it uses unifix cubes... I bought this cute clip art from Mel at Graphics from the Pond in the sales this week and was looking for an excuse to use them! ;)

This week's game is one that's really handy to reinforce counting and addition skills... It's great to use at the beginning of a lesson as a bit of a warm up.

To play, you just need a die, a heap of colour blocks/counters or unifix cubes and something for kids to write on - I usually give them their little whiteboards to work on. When I've played it with older kids, I've sometimes given them calculators as well so that they can double check their answers.

To start with, everyone takes five unifix cubes (or three, ten etc... Depending on how easy or difficult you want the game to be) and makes their tower. As a class, we then roll the die (1-6 maybe to start with, but you could use a 1-3 or 1-10-depending on how difficult you want the game to be) to allocate each cube a value.

Then each person works out how much their tower is 'worth' by adding the value of all of their cubes... the person with the highest value tower is the winner! I find kids really get into this game... you can also play it where the person with the lowest tower is the winner. Just a hint... make sure all the kids have their towers built before you assign values to the colours... otherwise you'll get some 'strategic' players who purposely choose the high value colours! ;)