Magical Product Swap

 

Over at Jessica Stanford's blog, she hosts a product swap every few months. I decided to join this time and LUCKY ME... I got matched up with Marcy at Saddle Up for Second Grade!  I was so excited to get her because she has some awesome stuff. She is also one of my TpT/blogger friends and was my niece's teacher in Texas!

After browsing through her TpT store, I settled on trying the Place Value Activity Pack: Hundred, Tens, and Ones. I already had her Pen Pals: Let's Make New Friends pack and just LOVE it. So, I knew this place value pack would be great too! Here's what the cover looks like...

This is actually a bundle of some of her individual place value activities. It includes I Spy Place Value, Mystery Numbers task cards, Place Value Memory, and my favorite - Place Value Slap Attack.

My class was so excited when I showed them that I had a bunch of new math centers. They LOVE math centers and these looked like so much fun! For this review, I'm going to focus on the Slap Attack game because I don't know if many of you are familiar with this game. I wasn't until I got this product.

Slap Attack consists of 20 cards with base-ten block models of numbers that look like this...

To play, you need 3 people. One will act as a referee. You start with the cards face-down. A player turns up one card and the first person to slap the card (not too hard!), gets to tell what number is shown. If the answer is correct, he or she gets to keep the card. If not, the other person gets a chance to answer and keep the card. The referee's job is to decide who slapped the card first. After going through all the cards, the player with the most wins.

My students LOVED this game! I was actually a little afraid of the slapping getting out of hand but they were really good with it. Having a referee definitely helps and they were all wanting to have that job. My camera wasn't cooperating but I was able to get a couple of decent pictures of my students playing.

 

 

These two girls played the game at least 5 or 6 times. As you can see in the pictures, they were turning over two cards at a time. After the few games, they decided to turn over two cards and slap the one with the largest number. Wow, what a great way to differentiate the game and they thought it up themselves! Some other things I really liked about this activity were the clear images of the blocks and the great size of the cards - not too small and not too big. Just right for second grade hands. You could also use these cards as flash cards to build quick recognition.

Since I was having camera issues, the rest of my pictures didn't turn out. But I'm planning to put all of the games out again next week. I'll be sure to get more pictures and add them to this post. I highly recommend a visit to Marcy's TpT store to check out this great Place Value Activity Pack (and many more awesome products). And don't forget to hop on over to her blog. You'll find a lot of super second grade stuff there (including a review of one of my products)!