These differentiated maths partner boxes are used almost every single day in my classroom! I love how easy they make it to differentiate my maths lessons and implement daily number sense games for Kindergarten. They help my students to build strong number foundations and develop their mental addition and subtraction skills.
How do they work?
Each child has a maths partner. I create my groupings by pairing students of similar maths ability. If I have an uneven number of students, I group my top three students together. Each group has their own maths box.
The boxes contain:
- 2 x 20 coloured counters
- 1 x 20 double sided counters
- Dice (both dot and numbers)
- 1 set of cards (royals removed)
- Ten frames
- Whiteboard markers and erasers
- Unifix cubes
Each box is differentiated. For example, some boxes have mostly 6 or 10 sided dice, while others have 10 or 20 sided dice. Some boxes also have MAB blocks for working with 2-digit numbers.
How do we use them?
Each week, we have a different game that we play throughout the week. Mostly the games only require equipment from their boxes, and usually a whiteboard. These games are ideally used as a warm up to every maths lesson, but sometimes I find the kids are having so much fun that we can make a whole lesson just out of maths games!
What is their purpose?
The games target a specific mental addition or subtraction strategy that the kids need to work on (e.g. counting on or back, friends of 10, doubling) and are differentiated according to where the kids are at. For example, some kids might be practising subitising, others might be working on counting on/back, and others might be practising partitioning tens and ones.
An important step is getting the kids to verbalise and explain what strategies they are using. They get better at doing this with practice, and learn that different strategies work better for different problems!
My number lines are available as a free download in the Freebee library. Click the image below for the link.
