Dice Football Part 3: Playing the Game!

Summary:

After setting up the teams and the competition, it’s now time to play the game! In this lesson, students will learn their 6,7,8, & 9 times table as well as improve thier mental strategies for solving problems.

Australian Curriculum Links:

Recall multiplication facts up to 10 × 10 and related division facts (ACMNA075)
Select and apply efficient mental and written strategies and appropriate digital technologies to solve problems involving all four operations with whole numbers (ACMNA123)
Solve problems involving multiplication of large numbers by one- or two-digit numbers using efficient mental, written strategies and appropriate digital technologies (ACMNA100)

Lesson:

Introduction:

Invite a student (Preferably a boy) to explain how a game of AFL Football is scored. A game of AFL is scored with 6 points and 1 point for a behind.

Body:

State to the students, we will be simulating games of AFL football, whilst learning our timestables in the process.
Invite a student to come up the front of the room. Get them to draw a 5 x 3 grid in the back of their maths books.
Label the thress columns, Goals, Behinds and Points
Give the students to 2 Dice saying once colour is the goals and the other is the behinds (I like to use green= goals, blue=behinds!). Invite the student to roll.
Ask the class ” Now Sam rolled a 5 with the green dice and a 2 with the blue dice, What is his score?” Well 5 multiplied by 6=30 add 2 gives me a score of 32.
Now i would roll “Ok i rolled 4 goals 3 behinds, what’s my score?” 27
Keep rolling until eventually we have a winner. Make sure you add your score progresively.
Invite students to play round 1 of the tournament.
As students play the game more and more, change the value of a goals 6 to 7,8 & 9 for extensions.

Conclusion:

Discuss different strategies on how to multiply the sums as well as shortcuts for addition too.

** In my classroom, I used this a warm up game about 2-3 times per week. It was great to get students thinking and they relished the opprotunity to compete against each other. But you can use this however you like!