Pirate Shares! A Division Game

Merry Christmas to all!  Hope that you had a wonderful holiday, and are enjoying a restful break!  It’s been really nice just snuggling with my dog, watching movies with my daughter, and having some days with nowhere to be and nothing on the schedule! J

And maybe that’s why I finally had some inspiration hit me today… J  Not that I’ve been lesson planning at ALL, but an idea came to me out of the blue so I ran with it!  In January our next math focus will be on division, as well as keeping those multiplication skills polished.  I started to kick around ideas of how to teach that concept… what do kids connect to that has to do with division?  What would make this often complicated skill fun and meaningful to my kiddos?  Somehow the answer that came to me was REALLY outta nowhere:  pirate treasure! J 

                                         

Pirate Shares, the game that came from this crazy brainstorm, is really fun!  Kids will “sail” their pirate ship across a treasure map game board, meanwhile trying to collect the most pirate gold.  On each turn, they turn over game cards that ask them to evenly divide a number of gold coins among a given number of pirates—hee hee.  J  If the number divides evenly, players get to keep a “share.”  If not, no gold is collected on that round.  There’s even wild cards mixed in to help players earn bonus coins or have coins snatched by “Parrot Pete.”  For extra fun, you can play with those plastic gold coins (saw some at the dollar store the other day).  Kids who struggle with division concepts can use the coins for hands-on manipulatives as they play the game.

I’ve added this game to my TPT site.  It includes the treasure map game board, all of the playing cards, a set of student-friendly directions, teacher directions, and even pirate ship game piece printables!

Looking forward to having something motivating and fun for students to jump into in January.  But until then…back to my dog, a movie, or perhaps even a book?   Wishing a very restful break to teachers everywhere! J