Bean Bag Toss

 I'm always trying to think of fun ways for my students to learn what I'm teaching them, whether it's reading and writing or math. One of the games I came up with is the "bean bag toss." It works great for spelling and math times tables. If I'm working with a beginning reader, I'll play together with them and we'll spell a word like "you." They'll start off with the bean bag and say the first letter, y, and throw me the bean bag. then I'll say the next letter, o, and throw it back to them. Then they finish off the word with the u. This works with one of my older students who is learning words like "psyche." We play it the same way, back and forth. 

For math, the bean bag is used to count by a number, like counting by 3s or by 6s. The student and I take turns saying the numbers following each other (3,6,9,etc) until we've gotten really high. I did this with a 10-year-old recently and we were counting by 7s, and we made it all the way up to 105! It can be a little bit of a brain strain for me, too, as reading is my forte, and I'm not as good in math. But the kids really love throwing the bean bag back and forth (especially if we can actually catch it!)

Howie wants to play too!