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What you need…
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Homemade river board or use our template – in template pack
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Wipeable cards- Buy here – https://amzn.to/3YiMMR0 or use our template to make times tables ‘bear’ cards for each times table you want to work on- in template pack
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Whiteboard and permanent marker pens
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One 1-10 dice
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Three rulers – or use our river template
Download templates here –
Dyscalculia Network – Bear Game – Templates
First make a river or use our template
Then using permanent pens on our template (or make your own on wipeable cards ) create a team of ten different coloured bears and give them names… and some honey!
Evie’s advice is make their faces round and keep the ears quite small. My first attempt to copy Evie’s game saw bears that looked more like mice – Evie told me my noses were too pointy and ears too big!!
Each time you play create a set for that times table.
Each player chooses five bears to be on their team. Write initials on the bears in your team. Place all the bears on one shore, with the honey on the other. The rulers or template logs become logs floating on the river!
Players take turns to roll the 1-10 dice. They multiply their roll by the tables they are practicing. Here we are doing the three times tables and have rolled a 9; 9 x 3 = 27. The bear with 27 (“Geoff”) on moves onto the first log. The bear moves even if it is not on your team!!
Play continues with the players taking it in turns to roll the dice. If a log has four bears already sat on it and another bear wants to go on the log the person who rolled gets to choose which bear is accidentally knocked off the log… this bears falls into the river and returns to the shore to start again.
Here “Sandra” (Bear 3) accidentally knocks “Dave” (Bear 12) off the log.
The winning bear team is the one to get the first bear across to the honey, having jumped onto each of the logs to reach the other side.
Another version is to see which teams gets three bears across first.
Make sure you cheer your bears on while you play the game – this makes it more fun and quite amusing!!
