One of My Favorite Math Games for Kinder and First: Sneak Thief

 "Let's play Sneak Thief" cried M. 

"Yes! I love that game!" replied J.

I pulled out the train blocks and we started making ten stacks of tens. 

"We are going to have 100 soon!" squeaked M.  I watched as the students started making their rows of ten blocks.  Some rows were all white, others black, and some trains were multicolored.  It didn't really matter what they looked like as long as there were ten rows of ten.

"Okay! Close your eyes," I called.  I watched as my first graders turned their backs and covered their eyes.  I pulled 3 rows of ten off the table and broke apart another two blocks from a ten and quickly hid them under the kidney table in my classroom.

"Open them! Can you figure out how many the sneak thief stole?" I asked.

Hmmm... I watched as the students counted tens, considered how many were left, counted them again.  Soon they touched the remaining eight that we in the ten that I broke apart.  M. was deep in thought and J. was touching the table and then writing a number sentence down on his white board.

"You took 32!" J. called.

"How do you know?" asked M.

"Look.  There are eight left from one train and then there are six trains left as well.  So, 100-32 = 68.  There has to be ten tens."

We played this game again and again because it helped my students visually understand what was happening in a subtraction problem where you need to break apart a ten.  Often times my littles come to me and they have memorized an algorithm but they do not understand why it works, nor do they have a way to draw or build a model to explain it.  

This game teachers the base ten number system and uses models to represent large numbers.  Students start to understand how numbers are formed in a very visual way so they can decomposed and compose numbers mentally and logically.

Sneak thief can easily be adapted to meet the needs of more accelerated learners by using larger numbers, numbers with ones in them, or adapted for striving learners by just playing with a ten.   It is great at home and also as a rotation in your math block.