Because of Omicron we have a lot of teachers absent and I am filling in all over the place. Yesterday I got to teach 4th grade math and had about 15 minutes to plan, and I knew the students had just started working on understanding decimals and connecting decimals to fractions.

I did a quick number talk in which the kids had to decide whether two fractions were equivalent or one was greater, and they developed some strategies like using 1/2 as a benchmark and noticing proportionality. We had a little discussion about whether 1/2 = 1÷2 and they had to prove it, then we played the game. It was great. Even though I had introduced it to them as “one of my favorite math games of all time,” I guess they were skeptical (understandable), because I overheard comments like, “wow, this is ACTUALLY really fun.” It was pretty amazing to hear the teams discussing their choices and how the game pushed them to understand fraction relationships. I could also reinforce the idea of fractions as division and the connection to decimals by asking them how we could accurately compare them, and then making a big dramatic show of typing each number into a calculator and slowly writing it on the board as they watched. Sometimes we rounded to hundredths but we also had to go into thousandths a bit so they got practice comparing and subtracting decimals to figure out who won. They did not want to stop playing at the end of class.

So, thanks for a great moment in the middle of some crazy times in education.