Today marks the beginning of our one-hour longer work days. Because of the number of snow days our state (Indiana) has had this winter (thus far), schools will have several options making up the snow days. Our school opted for extending the work days by one hour (6 hours = 1 school day). As you know, kids and teachers are already exhausted at the end of they day. Not only exhausted, but starving, cranky, and ready for a nap. We decided to be creative and use this time to add a little fun to our classroom. Today, we had snack, and played a game called SKUNK! I attended a STEM conference several years ago, and this was an activity they presented to us. My second graders love it. You can find the PDF version of the
SKUNK by clicking, the SMART NOTEBOOK version
here, and the Promethean (ActiveInspire) version
here .
Here are a few pictures of what our class looked like playing SKUNK:
As you can see, I have a Promethean Board. I pull up the ActiveInspire SKUNK game on my Proboard. The students need a blank (or scrap) piece of paper. They lay their paper horizontal (example on Proboard game) and make columns with SKUNK. 5 letters in the word skunk=5 rounds of play.
Object of the game: Students try to score the highest roll on each round (using 2 dice). Rounds are played whole group, and everyone plays the S round before moving on to the K round and so on.
To start off (after papers are made), all students stand up. 2 dice are rolled (either on the board) or if you don't have a board, regular dice will work fine). Students decide if they want the sum rolled. If they decide they do, they write the sum rolled under the round they are on and sit down. If they don't want that sum, they can remain standing. The dice are rolled again. Of course the only players left in the round are the players still standing. The ones sitting have to wait until the round is over to play again. Don't worry, it only takes a few minutes to play each round. Again, students decide if they want to keep the sum of the dice or continue playing. The catch is that if a one is rolled at anytime, students that are still standing for that round receive a 0 (zero) for that round. If double ones (snake eyes) are rolled the students that are still standing receive a 0 (zero) for that round and all previous round scores are marked out and a zero is given for those rounds as well. It really is taking a game of chance (and gamble of course). The winner is the person with the highest total after the 5 SKUNK rounds of play.
Here I have some students playing the round and some students sitting already.
Finally, this student is adding up all 5 of here rounds to determine her overall score.
The game is really quick (taking only about 10 minutes to play), the students enjoy the game and catch on fast, and it teaches a variety of skills (probability, chance, and addition)
