Second Grade Bowling Math Facts

So what happens when you have an evacuation drill and you get back to school at almost the time to go home so you figure your group will not be coming to you today????

Well...your group shows up and you make sure their teacher knew they were coming.  Then you get excited that they did not want to miss the math group even though it was almost time to go home!  Then you think quick because what you had originally planned isn't going to work because it was meant for the whole 30-40 minutes you usually have.

So you break out your wooden bowling set that was left to you by a previous teacher.  We had not used this yet.  There were 15 pins.  What better way to do some equations.  Of course the student in the top picture got a strike every time so his equation was always 15-15=0 haha.  So he made predictions on what the others would bowl and what those equations would be.

For the rest of the students I asked them how many they knocked down.  Then I asked them what their equation would be.  We talked about what they might need to do to get a strike.  We also took two people's total starting pins which was 30 and then subtracted how many were knocked down by each person.  They had to keep track of the 30 and then how many were knocked down by themselves and another student and then come up with an equation for that.  All this happened in about 15 minutes.  That was all the time I had with them today but just enough to get some math thinking going before they went home.