When we were testing in our tech room the other day, I noticed a bucket of bottle caps. I asked the instructional technologist about them and she said that she enters the codes from them and then has just been saving them because she felt bad throwing them away. I asked if I could have them and she said sure!
I did a google search on ways to use them for math games and found a sort with decimals, percents, and fractions. I was talking to one of our 4th grade teachers about modifying it for her class and we decided on equivalent fractions. When I started making them, I looked up the standards to make sure I set it up with the correct fraction ranges and I found that many of the other NF standards could be made into games for practice using bottle caps too! I got distracted and pumped out 4 different tasks in about 30 minutes. I wrote the standard on the front of the Solo cups she gave me to store them and I took pictures of the games for task cards by putting 4 images on a piece of cardstock and cutting them apart. They fit really well in the cups. I am going to ask teachers to start saving the mini Pringles containers for the future!
The funny part is, I hadn’t even made the original game we discussed yet!
Later in the day, our Kindergarten teachers used them for making ordering number games and missing number games. Our 2nd grade teachers used them for repeated addition through skip counting.
I know this idea has been around for a long time…but we were excited to re-purpose these caps into useful tools for individual practice!
I’ll try to post more pics as we create them. Please share your ideas!
mscastillosmath 