Snow Much Fun {with Multi-Digit Addition}

Hi friends!  It's Amanda from

I've been MIA lately, mostly due to the fact that my student teacher has been teaching for the past six weeks.  However, I'm excited to say that I will be teaching again on Monday!  Just in time to implement one of my favorite activities in math....Snowball Fights!

My students would practice mutli-digit addition and subtraction ALL DAY LONG with this activity!  I've blogged about it before, but I've created a new, quick file that will make it even easier and I thought I would share it with you today.

Basically, in the past this is how it has worked...

I let each student write a number in LARGE, NEAT print on a piece of white paper.  Then, we crumpled the papers up to look like paper snowballs.  Students were divided into two teams.  Each student was given a partner on the opposing team.  One team was placed on each side of the classroom and threw their snowballs at a given signal.  Then, students scrambled to pick up a snowball and headed back to meet with their partner.  (I always toss in a few extra snowballs because there are always a few "lost" during the game.)  Partners opened up their snowballs to reveal numbers and independently created and solved addition problems.  Partners compared answers.  If their answers matched, they took their snowballs back to their sides, ready for the next throw.  If answers did not match, students worked together to figure out the correct answer.  I also walked around and monitored to help in the rare case that partners' answers matched, but incorrectly.

Seriously, they could do this on repeat ALL DAY LONG!

A couple of minor problems I've had with this in the past is that sometimes student numbers were hard to read by classmates (imagine that?!  sloppy second grade writing), students would turn some numbers upside down (is that 81 or 18?), and there was no way for me to ensure numbers that required "no regrouping" or "regrouping".

So, I created a very simple file of print-friendly numbers to use for this game.  There's a set for "no regrouping" and a set for "regrouping".  Just print, pass out, and you're ready to go!  You could also collect them at the end for reuse.

I hope you'll be able to use this file and bring a little snow fun to your math class!

**OPTIONAL DROPBOX LINK, IN CASE THE GOOGLE DRIVE LINK HAS MAXED ITS DOWNLOAD LIMIT IN THE GIVEN TIME FRAME - https://www.dropbox.com/s/67pubu3wlh6xjfc/SnowMuchFun.pdf?dl=0 **

If you're looking for more practice with mutli-digit addition and subtraction, you might like my new "Start Your Engines" centers.  I realized that I didn't have very many centers for this concept AT ALL.  So, I created a set of 10 "any time" centers revolving around just these concepts.

If you're not familiar with our "any time" center sets, they include 10 centers all revolving around one unit with a theme that can be used any time of the year!  What more could you need?  Click below for a closer look.