Bunny Money

Play Money can bring energy and delight to almost any game or drill activity. Simply use Bunny Money in place of points. Players love trading in for larger and larger denominations. They particularly relish the imagined wealth they see and feel coming into their hands. Click here to download. Then copy on tag board or cover stock, and cut out for use with any game or task reward system.

Use of Generic Board Games for Drill Activities

Any simple board game such as Chinese Checkers can be used as drill incentive. Each turn can follow one small task such as spelling a word or dividing a word in syllables. The most important factor is to be sure that the game itself does not require too much strategic thinking of its own to distract students from the focused activity. For example, how about trying...

Syllable Division Practice
With any simple game you can find...

Dividing words into syllables naturally and quickly is one of the best tools for pain free reading. The rules aren't 100% fool-proof, but they're reliable enough to at least get started. After a few rounds of a syllable division game, students will recognise the patters that usually lead to long vowels one way and short vowels the other way! Click here to download.

Swoop: An Adding Game for Practice and Fun

Real playing cards are a great turn-on for kids, and the pictured images can be very useful for children who need concrete representation. This game is played a little like the traditional card game, "War." The winner of each round or "swoop" is the one with the highest sum of two cards laid down. First prepare a deck of cards for play. Take out any jokers, jacks, and kings. Let the queens = 0 and the aces = 1. To control for difficulty, remove any numbers that would be too hard for either player. Then consider if you would like to divide the deck in two. If you separate the cards into a first addend pile and a second addend pile, you can avoid adding two larger numbers. You can also limit the second pile to just ones, or ones and twos if that is what your students need to practice. Players may also like to have game boards. Draw the spaces for each player's sum large enough to accommodate two playing cards along with the plus and equal signs.

To Play: Deal out one pile of first addends and one pile of second addends to each player (or combine both piles in one). When the dealer calls "Play," both players lay down two cards, one from each pile. When a player thinks his numbers combine to make the larger sum, he calls out "swoop." If he is right, he gets to swoop down and take all four cards but not until he can give the sums of both pairs of numbers. If he is wrong, the other player gets the cards. When the winner of the swooped cards slips them back under his own piles, he must take care that the first addend cards and the second addend cards get into the right piles. If both sums are the same, then each player places three cards face-down over just one of the original cards followed by a fourth card facing up. The winner of that play gets to swoop ALL the cards. The winner of the game is the one who has the most cards left when time is up or the one who still has cards when the other player is out.

Fraction Swoop: Prepare the game boards and the deck of cards for numerators and denominators instead of for addends. In this case the denominator pile could be given all the 2s, 4s, 5s, and 10s. Fraction Swoop can also be adjusted for levels of difficulty by limiting the size of the numerators as well as the denominators.