Math Game: Hide the Mice!
Goal: to be the first to score 10 points
Materials: poker chips or other manipulatives, cup
How to play: arrange a small number of chips, or “mice,” on a table, probably 10 or less for a child under five. Make sure the child sees how many chips are on the table and then ask her to close her eyes. While her eyes are closed, slip some of the chips under the cup. Then ask the child to open her eyes and try to guess how many of the “mice” are under the cup. Correct answers get a point!
I tried this game for the first time with Penny this morning after getting the idea from Chris Confer’s book Teaching Number Sense: Kindergarten. Chris’ book is a great resource for ideas, theories and application of games and methodologies for teaching math to children. She describes a game and then relates her experience playing this game or teaching a certain concept to Kindergarten level children, complete with their quoted thought processess, successes and failures. She also has a 1st-grade level book which follows the same format. If you find the information on this site helpful, then you’ll find her books doubly so. Books liker hers, and others, is what this site is at least loosely modeled after.
The best thing about this game is that it’s a great way to help a child to grow away from merely being able to solve a subtraction problem by simply following a mechanical algorithm which she hardly understands, to using logic to come to the conclusion Hey, here is where I can use that subtraction stuff Dad was talking about! Penny is quite capable of looking at a flash card and saying, Ok, I count out 10 chips, then I take away five, and that means I have five left! After this one fairly brief session, however, that next step in understanding is not yet with us.
My goal with the Hide The Mice game is to allow the opportunity for Penny to reason for herself that if we started with 10 mice, and now only five mice are showing, I can subtract five from 10 and compute that there are five mice hidden under the cup! I suspect that this is advanced thinking and reasoning for a 4 1/2 year-old child. I cannot corroborate that as I don’t spend much time with other children of her age, and hardly ever am I doing anything related to math with other children, nor do I have any formal training that would help me know. However Confer’s book does a great job of recording the whole conversation between a group of Kindergarten students and Confer herself as they go through a math game or concept and I would say that Penny would fall somewhere in the high-middle of that group for conceptual ideas, and near the top for mechanical activities, but she has almost exactly a full year before she’ll be in Kindergarten, so I am positive that this will be old hat for her by then.
In retrospect I feel that I should have let her fail a bit at this game. To explain, when she would attempt to figure out how many mice were under the cup, she would just guess a number, albeit a number less than the total we started with. I would then ask her why she thought there were that many mice and she would say “because there could be that many.” True, and I agreed with her, but then I should have let her peek under the cup, count the mice, and see that her guess was not correct. Rather, I talked her through the reasoning I would have gone through. Perhaps my biggest foible is not being able to always withhold teaching. In other words, I would like to better resist the temptation to tell her how to go about figuring the answer, and just let her hit upon the answer herself. The danger with something this relatively complicated is that it could take her a real long time to reason through and come up with the right solution and frustration and disillusionment might very well come around before success. It’s an issue I’m struggling with and I’ve read a lot of different ideas from a lot of different people on what’s best and any consensus is nebulous.
Anyway this is a game I will revisit quite often until she’s not only completely comfortable with the mechanics involved, but also until she truly understands what is happening, why subtraction is the tool to use to figure the answer, and can show her understanding by applying this same concept to a related but different application. All in all it’s not the mechanics I’m so interested in her learning, though they are unavoidable and necessary. It’s the understanding and the fluidity of conceptual tool usage I’m going for. I think the Hide The Mice game is a great way to help this process. And who can resist finding hidden mice?
