Are you looking for ways to make math skills practice more engaging and fun? KleenSlate Response Paddles not only makes practice fun for students, using them provides instant feedback for both students and teachers as well a quick method to know when to re-teach or offer remedial assistance.

Here are some guidelines and suggestions for teachers who want to use KleenSlate Response Paddles to practice math skills and concepts.

Basics Guidelines:

• Give each student a KleenSlate Paddle with an attached marker and eraser.
• Ask students to perform a specific math task on the paddle.
• Have all students hold up their Paddles to display responses.
• Write and show the correct response on your Paddle.
• Instruct students to keep a record of the accuracy of their responses.

The teacher also records which students are responding correctly. She can use this information to plan remedial instruction for specific students.  If a large number of students fail to respond accurately, the teacher may decide to re-teach the concept.

Here are some specific skills and ways to use Paddles to practice math skills:

Individual Practice:

• Drawing a specific geometric shape.  For younger students ask them to draw basic shapes, i.e. rectangle, circle, and triangle. For older students, ask for more difficult shapes (pyramid, cube, pentagon, hexagon, cone, triangle-isosceles, equilateral, and scalene).
• Have students draw a clock face on their boards and practice writing times dictated by the teacher.
• Write numbers counting by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s, 10’s, etc. as quickly as possible within a certain time limit.
• Ask students to write “number sentences” to express a given number.  For example: the number 12 can be represented by: 3×4=12 14-2=12, 6+6=12. For an extra challenge: ask students to write a specific number of sentences within a given time limit.
• Ask students to reduce fractions or write factors or multiples of a number.

Partner activities:

• Partner students. Have one student write two numbers on a paddle and then pass the paddle to the partner who determines the correct symbol to go between the numbers, i.e.  >, <, or =.
• Have each student write a math calculation problem and then exchange Paddles. The partners solve each other’s problems, and then return the Paddle to the problem writer who checks the accuracy of the answer.

Group activity

Have students categorize numerically. For example, ask students to write the day and month of their birthdays on the Paddle. Then have them line up silently in chronological order according to birthdays, using the information on the Paddles. This activity can also be performed using other numbers such as their numerical address, phone numbers, or combined age of siblings.

To print a copy of these guidelines and suggested activities open this PDF file:Using Paddles to Practice Math Skills

Please let us know how you are using Response Paddles to practice math skills in the comment section of this blog. We love to gather new ideas.