Hi Ho Turkey-O

Here's a fun math game for preschoolers and early elementary students to play around Thanksgiving time. (aka turkey time)

    

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My kids have always loved playing Hi Ho Cherry-O, and this Fall we decided to play a version of it with a play-dough turkey we called Hi Ho Turkey-O! We practiced our addition and subtraction facts as well as writing numbers and equations with this game.

To play you will need:

Feathers

Brown, orange, and red Play-Doh

Dice

a piece of paper and a pencil

First, make 2 Play-doh turkeys, one for each of you (or more if more than 2 people are playing).
We were starting with addition, so we left our turkeys featherless.

I got a die and put a star sticker over both the 5 and 6.  Christopher rolled and then got to add that many feathers to his turkey.  He then wrote down the equation on a piece of paper.  If he rolled a star, he had to take 2 feathers off of his turkey, and write down the equation.

We played until someone got 10 or more feathers in their turkey.

Then we played again, this time plucking the feathers off of our turkey (I think he enjoyed this way more.)  We made sure we both started with 10 feathers in our turkeys, and rolled the die to see how many feathers we got to pluck off.  If a star was rolled in this version, he had to put 2 feathers back on.

While we played, we talked about math.  How many more do you need to reach 10?  Who has more feathers?  How many more do you have than I have?

Of course, Nathan and  Joshua wanted to play too.

With Nathan I talked about less and more.  Do you have more feathers than mommy?  And he was very good at counting the dots on the die and adding them to his turkey.  He was not as good at the subtraction version because he just enjoyed pulling all the feathers off at once too much to just do a few at a time.

Joshua wanted to play until we reached 20.  It made for a very full feathered turkey.

You could also play this in a school setting as a center station or splitting up into small groups.

This was a fun and easy way to make math more engaging this morning.  Sometimes it's the little things that make school time more fun, like plucking feathers off a turkey.