Roll and Round!

Two or more learners roll dice, create numbers and round them off to the place value chosen, such as tens, hundreds.

PURPOSE

This activity ensures the learners are able to round numbers mentally and automatically.

• Step 1

  Each learner needs a set of dice and some paper and a pencil. The number of dice used should match whatever place value the learner is working on (e.g., if they are focusing on hundreds, then each learner needs 3 die).

• Step 2

  For each round, every learner gets a turn to roll all their three dice at the same time and build a number with it. Then, each person rounds his/her number to the highest place value (e.g., hundred if they have 3 dice). For example, if the learner rolled 3, 5, and 2 the number they get is 352 and they can round it up to 400. Alternatively, if the dice rolled was 2, 3, 1 the number is 231 and they can round it down to 200. For learners that will only round to the 10’s, they can roll 5, 6 the number is 56 and this can be rounded to 60 etc.

• Step 3

  Then, the players compare their rounded numbers and the highest correctly rounded number wins and gets a point.

• Step 4

  The first player to get 10 points wins.

• Additional Exercise

  Change the value chosen to round off to for each round (e.g., kids have 4 dice and round to the thousands in the first round and then the next round they have 3 dice and round to the hundreds).

  This can also be played with decimals, fractions etc.

• Simplified Exercise

  Have the learner play the game with one dice or two dice only. So they only round to zero or tens.