Personal Savings Account

Score Sheet

Tom Schersten: In the last video, we talked about how to play the basic trading game with a personal savings account paper and the score sheet. In this video, we’re going to talk about extensions to make the game go faster, and how to use it for subtraction.

When we first start playing this game, usually what we’re doing is just rolling a single die into the plate, and we’re adding it each time. If we want the game to move a little faster, we can certainly roll two dice into the plate and add them together.

If we happen to be learning multiplication, we might roll two dice into the plate and multiply them with each other. We can add another die. We can have three dice and add them together.

One of my favorites is to roll three dice, add two of them together, and multiply by the third one. The total that you get depends on how you pair them up.

Another option is that I happen to have the 10 sided dice that have all the digits 0 through 9. We can roll this die and get up to nine on a turn. I also have a jumbo decahedral die that has 10s on it, so I can roll a two digit number each time.

Here’s a 44. I also happen to have some dice that have two digits on them. I have dice that have the numbers 13 through 18. I have dice that have the numbers 19 through 24, and dice that have the numbers 25 through 30.

We can roll a two digit die, or if we like, we can roll two two digit dice. Add them together for what they’re taking. Notice we’ve got lots of ways to make this game accelerate, depending on what level the kids are at.

We also use this game for subtraction. We would start with maybe 255 on the paper, and each time we roll the dice, we subtract.

Again, we have all of these different kinds of dice we could use, so we can be subtracting slowly or more quickly. Later on I like to use my add/subtract die to do mixed addition and subtraction.

Kids will roll this with the other dice, and sometimes it will be adding and sometimes subtracting. As you know, if we’ve done subtraction problems for a while and we switch to addition, the kids still do subtraction because they’re not looking at the sign.
With this die here, kids have a chance to really focus on what the sign is.

Personal Savings Account

Score Sheet