M&M Fridays

We began our new school year a few weeks ago and it is going great so far. This year I decided to focus on seeking excellence on skills already learned, like building quick mental math skills on already learned math facts, in addition to the new skills we will be learning. I decided that I would add a little extra incentive to help motivate the kids to put extra time in honing their skills, and so began M&M Fridays!


I wrote down the areas that I wanted to give special attention to this year and made lists of games to play that would help build the skill, and the winners will earn, what else? M&Ms!! My plan is to give each of the kiddos a cup to hold their M&M's they earn throughout the morning, then they will put these aside and enjoy them during our Friday Night Family Night that we do every Friday. So, as far as games, this is what I have come up with so far:


Bible


For Bible I thought it would be fun to make our own version of Jeopardy. I will list different categories like Wisdom, New Testament, Miracles, etc.,etc... I also thought that this would be a good place to test our Scripture memory verses and our knowledge of the Catechism questions and answers, so those two will make up two more categories. The game will be played just like Jeopardy, of course, and the winner will receive 10 M&Ms, but during the game the kids will each receive 1 M&M for each answer they get correct.


We have a few other games that we may rotate in here and there like The Richest Christian Game, Moses Knows the Ten Commandments, and The Battle for the Mind computer game, that I will use a very similar M&M reward system for.


Math


We have been enjoying the new game show called 'Minute to Win it' lately and it gave me some inspiration for building quick math skills this year. The game can vary for whatever particular skill you are working on. For this game you will need two dice and a minute timer, and if you happen to have the Phase 10 dice game, you will want two of the dice with the numbers 5-10 on them. The idea of the game is that your child has a minute to, initially, beat you to the sum or product of the two dice rolled within a minute; however, as your child improves the object will change to how many times your child can beat you in a minute. So if you are working on addition, you will roll the dice and say the sum as quickly as possible as many times as you can in a minute. If your child can say the sum before you within a minute, he/she will get 10 M&Ms. As your child improves then you can give them an M&M for every time they beat you to the answer in a minute. I like to use the 'Phase 10' dice because with regular dice you can only practice the addition facts for 1-6. If you are teaching a particular math trick like the 9's trick (ex. 9+6=10+5, you take one from the 6 and give it to the 9), you can keep one die 9 and only roll the other die. Another variation is for when you are teaching the odds and evens addition rule (odd+odd=even, even+even=even, odd+even=odd), but instead of saying the sum you say whether the answer will be odd or even. If you are working on multiplication, then you simply say the product rather than the sum; in addition, you can just do the facts for one number, say 4, by just keeping one of the die at 4 and only roll the other. For little ones this game can be kept simple by just rolling one die and saying what plus 5 would equal the number (ex. if you roll a 7 the answer would be 5 and 2).


We will play other math games as well, like the Phase 10 Dice game and Cribbage, or sometimes we will just simply do timed math sheets (here is a great site to create your own math sheets) with a 10 M&M reward for the first one to complete the sheet accurately in addition to one M&M for every correct answer for each kid.


The possibilties are endless. This week we are working on writing our numbers 0-9 correctly because we still get a few backwards. The competition will be who can write them correctly first with the same reward system as the timed math sheets.



Reading and Language



Our reading program involves my kids memorizing the 70 most used phonograms of our language, which includes many phonograms that have more than 1 sound (ough has 6! Can you name them?) and so they memorize those sounds in the order of most common to least common. Needless to say, this is a big task, and so I will be using M&M Fridays to encourage getting these mastered quickly. We will do oral or written tests for M&Ms, or play some games with them.



For spelling, we will be having a good old-fashioned spelling bee each week. Each kid will have their own set of words from their previous week's spelling. Again the reward system will be 10 for the winner and an additional 1 for each word spelled correctly by all, but in addition to this I thought I would add a couple extra M&Ms for acknowledging when there is a spelling rule involved and for the correct explanation of the rule. When we want a break from this we will play Scrabble Crossword Game , Quiddler or Upwords, or some other game that involves spelling.



I am trying to put more time and effort into vocabulary this year and I thought M&M Friday would be a good chance to work on it. We will be playing Rummy Roots Card Game , Blurt, Apples to Apples, Word Roots computer game with the same basic reward system here as well.



Grammar is still coming together in mind, but so far I have decided to use a book I picked up second-hand the other day by Evan-Moore called Daily Paragraph Editing, Grade 6 for my older two by giving them a paragraph to edit and 1 M&M for each mistake they catch. For all of the kids, we will play the Mad Libs Card Game.



Memory Work



And last but not least, I have been making a mental list of things I want the kids to memorize like the Preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, large passages of Scripture like the Sermon on the Mount. For my younger ones I am thinking of simpler things like the months of the year and other things they may not have down yet. I am offering a whopping 25 M&Ms for a perfect recitation!

Other Subjects

That is it as far as the M&M reward portion of our fridays go, but I may incorporate an occasional geography bee, history bee or science fair with M&M rewards as well.



We will also use fridays to do group writing activities using Marjorie Frank's fantastic ideas in these terrific books!