Change it up a little with this dice game!

At the beginning of each school year, I find it helps students to do activities that will review skills that I know they didn't practice during the summer. 

This is an easy activity to prep and use to review computation of three digit numbers, as well as place value.

All you need are 7 number cubes (a.k.a. dice), label stickers and a marker.  Actually, you can use as many number cubes as you wish. 

I only had these circle stickers available, but they were larger than the sides of the cubes, so all I did was cut them into the squares. 

 

 

You will only need six stickers per cube.

For this set, I only used addition and multiplication.  But you can change it up depending on the grade level.  Just keep in mind that if you use subtraction, some answers will be negative.  If you use division, instruct students to create a fraction/mixed number or decimal as the answer.  Rounding might be necessary for the latter.

I placed a multiplication sign and addition sign opposite to each other.  In other words, "X" on top and "+" on bottom.

 

This is what they ended up looking like when I was done.  The stickers held on pretty good, so I'm not really worried about them popping off. If they do, I'll probably just cover with clear tape.


So, here are the directions to the game.  Again, depending on grade level, you can make this anywhere from a 2-digit by 1-digit game to a 4-digit by 2-digit game.  It just depends on students and what they need to practice.

This is a two to four player game. There are three sets to roll per round.  The first roll creates the first number in the problem. The second roll determines the operation (x or +). The third roll determines the second number in the problem.

In this pic, you can see the first roll came up with a 1, 5 and 3.  The second roll came up as "x", and the third roll came up with a 6, 4, and 4.

Here is where the place value comes in. Have students discuss the largest possible number they can create with what they rolled.  In this case, the first number is 532 and the second is 644.  Now students just multiply the two together.

This can become a self checking activity simply by assigning a calculator and having each player take turns checking the answer to see who did it correctly.  This provides immediate feedback for students that might have erred in their calculations.

I hope this was helpful! If you have any other ideas to add using this activity, please leave them in the comments below.

Thanks for looking!!!