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Grades 3-5
128 cards—57 pages

This is a book of playful, intelligent practice that creates a positive attitude toward mathematics. Students will feel pride in their work as they successfully decode a grid of numbers in order to meet the goal of blocking out the entire game card.

Blockout! offers 128 game cards of different levels of challenge to best meet the needs of your students. The game, played individually or in groups, has students trying to block out an entire grid by finding combinations of two to four addends that add up to a given sum. Problems go from sums of six to sums of 20. The twist is that the numbers must be located adjacent to one another.

Blockout! encourages mental calculations and builds students’ problem-solving abilities. Each blockout card is self-correcting in that if it isn’t totally blocked out, students can look for different combinations of addends until all numbers are used. This feature reduces the need for teacher intervention and empowers the students as they solve the correct pattern for a given card.

Teachers are encouraged to have students use colored tiles to play the game as this lets students correct a false move without leaving any record of the mistake. A positive sense of accomplishment is achieved when blockout occurs as only the correct solution remains without any trace of errors. Students are excited about their success. Blockout! will become quickly become a favorite classroom activity!