Quick and Easy Math Game

With the new Common Core Standards becoming more rigorous for first grade; students need to acquire a sense of place value much quicker.  For the last couple of weeks since our return to school we've been focusing on the value of a number and counting to 120 and higher.

We used our 120's chart to count by 10's, 5's, and 2's. Students marked up their charts with different colors as they were counting.

We used yellow to color in the tens, a blue square to count by fives, orange to count by two's (even #'s,) and green to count by two's beginning with 1(odd #'s).

I gave each student a ones cube to use as a game piece, and 1 die. The dice I have are pretty cool. They are a dice in a dice. So, they had two options. When they rolled the dice to move their game piece they could either just count the 1 side or add up the two.  Most students started with 1.  They soon realized they would move quicker through the game board if they were adding the two dice instead.

Afterwards, I asked some questions to make sure they were really paying attention.
What was the highest value you rolled? (12)
What was the lowest value? (1 if you used just counted 1 dice)
Which was a faster way to get through the chart-1 die or 2? (of course, the unanimous answer was 2)
This game helped build their addition skills as well as their sense of place value and number sense.