Explain comes THIRD! Rather than holding all the students hostage as I go through all the Farkle rules and showing them how I play and giving them my strategies, instead we start with seeing what students can figure out. Start a lesson with engaging students (give them dice). Playing Farkle with students can model the 5 E’s lesson plan. 5 E’s: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, Evaluate I try to encourage students to make different choices “are you sure, why wouldn’t you keep both the 1’s?” Challenge their thinking and have them defend their decision. Return the students to keep playing encouraging them to strategize with each other, defend their choices, and continue to answer questions. I love that not everyone would do it the same way or for the same reasons. This is where the students can discuss their strategies and reasoning. “Who would only keep one of the 1’s and roll the other 5 dice?” There are at least 3 legitimate choices for what to do next. Who would roll the 2 junk dice to try for additional points? “Why would you be willing to risk your 300 points?” I might ask one of the students who indicates they would take this option. I would ask for a show of hands, who would do this option. This is 300 points so I could take my 300 points and stop. This is an opportunity to further clarify some of the game rules. After a bit, I pull everyone’s attention and we do a round together. I go around and answer questions, making clarifications to the small groups. They are asking questions of each other, trying something, and debating the rules. The conversations students naturally engage in when trying to figure out how to play are great. Greet students at the door and ask them to work collaboratively to play Farkle and figure it out. It’s simply one sheet, front and back, and includes a scoring sheet. The directions are intentionally not a guidebook. My lesson plan is to greet students at the door with paper directions (or direct them to Google Classroom for the linked Google Doc with directions) of how to play Farkle. I like to use Farkle as a model for what strategic thinking (DOK 3) looks like. If you roll and have no point scoring dice you Farkle and have a score of zero for the round. 3 of a kind or a straight will earn you more points. A 1 is worth 100 points and a 5 is worth 50. In a nutshell, Farkle is a dice game with 10 rounds to score the most points. Google Slides Template: /farkleslides Farkle Dice Thanks to new capabilities to use Google Apps Script in Google Slides I have been able to add dice rolling in the Google Slides. I think using actual dice is better but when we do not have access to dice, it’s a decent alternative. The Google Sheets spreadsheet had a menu I coded to allow students to roll dice within the spreadsheet. Previously I had blogged on playing Farkle and provided a template in Google Slides and Google Sheets.
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