Middle School Math Games (A REVIEW)

 
Today I am sharing with you a great math resource. It's Middle School Math Games from The Critical Thinking Co. We have enjoyed using many different books from The Critical Thinking Co. over the years for various subjects including math, logic, grammar, and critical thinking skills. Some of these are full curriculum resources, and some are just a supplement like this one, Middle School Math Games.

We received the physical copy of Middle School Math Games. It's a soft cover book about a quater inch thick, with black and white pages (no color). It's a workbook with instructions on how to play the games, but instead of writing in the book we chose to photocopy the pages so that we can play the games multiple times because they are actually kind of fun! Yes, math can be fun and challenging, and this book is a great way to get your middle schooler's mind engaged.

The games in this book jump right into a lot of algebra, so your middle schooler should be ready to work with adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions, decimals, and negative numbers. There are no "lessons" about these concepts, just instructions for each game, and sometimes a little snippet about a math concept. There are a lot of examples of how to work the problems within the games so that is helpful to know if you are working the problem right.

The student activity worksheet for the first game "Greater Than, Less Than" game. It was also suggested to use a white board, and I could see how that could be useful if the kids wanted to do way more problems. I know I did!

The first game we played was a greater than, less than game. To play this game we had to add, subtract, multiply, or divide positive and negative numbers to make the inequality statement correct. To do this we had to really think about the placement of each number that we were given. Trying to guess which side was best to put it on so that it would make the statement true. As you can see in the photo above, I put in the negative 4 in a place I thought it would work after using the random number generator (pictured below)

Most of these games require very little in tools and extras. To play this game we used the random number generator as suggested, setting the parameters from -10 to 10. It was easy and readily available!

The completed worksheet. Some of the equations/numbers worked to make the inequality right, some didn't! It was a challenge to think about where to put the numbers.

After the spaces are filled in, it's was time to work out the problem to see if the inequality was maintained. Immediately you can see how you could have rearranged the numbers to make it work better. Totally gets you thinking, and pretty soon you want to do more to see if you can beat it! Which means the student is learning about operations and order and math while being challenged.

Another completed worksheet. The nice thing about copying them is we could do this many times. Or, we could have used a white board.

To take the challenge further we could do the same thing with negative and positive fractions. This was a fun challenge to remember how to work fractions and remember how the negative numbers play in the equations.

Completed fractions student activity sheet.

The Critical Thinking Co. really makes learning fun with all their books. I was kind of surprised how fun doing some algebra could be with these games. The crew all reviewed different books, so if you want to see what other books they offer check out the reviews by clicking on the banner below.

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