ABSTRACT
People have engaged in playing games and solving puzzles for thousands of years. Games and puzzles continue to provide important opportunities for children to experience playful learning. Games and puzzles are included in most mathematics curriculum resources, and teachers might offer them as a choice at a center, as an independent activity during math workshop, or as a rotation during instructional time. The students were playing a game the teacher called Seven Sevens. The game required players to take turns rolling two dice, adding the numbers shown, checking the sum with their partners, and coloring in a circle every time the sum was seven. The “Variations” section suggests ways to change the game or puzzle to better reach the range of learners in your class, to sustain its worthiness as student learning progresses, or to adapt it to better fit another grade level than indicated in the classroom story.
