Multiplication Baseball: A distance collaboration activity

I want to thank Stephanie Wahlstrom for organizing this lesson. Today, our third graders used our Polycom system to play a game of multiplication baseball with students at Reinhardt Elementary in Dallas, TX.

Stephanie created game pieces for our students using school mascots and the student's first names. She also created a ball diamond and used velco strips to hold the game pieces on each base. Students were shown a multiplication flash card and were asked to say the correct answer. If they answered correctly, dice were rolled. If the product of the dice was 0-5, the play was considered an out. 6-10 on the dice was single. 11-20 a double. 21-30 was a triple and 31-36 a home run. (That was actually just an example as I really do not remember how scoring went.) Three outs and it was the other school's turn.

As soon as school was out today our third grade teacher, Emily Schmidt, came down to talk to me about this lesson. She loved it and was already making plans to use the lesson in her classroom. Emily and I talked about how this could be done with Smartboard software. In a matter of minutes, Emily had created a game board to use on her Smartboard, so she could also use the basic format of this game across her curriuclum.

Let me know you have used a game such as multiplication baseball in your classroom. I would love to hear your stories and share ideas for implementation with teachers in Burrton.