Snowballs and Math

We have plenty of snow outside. We just can't play with it, because it's just been way too cold to go outside. Fortunately, though cooped up inside, they're hangin' with me fairly well. It helps that we take lots of breaks. Today we took one that they'd love to repeat often. I didn't invent the idea, but I did take it up a notch by adding a simple math component.

I split the group in half and sent them to opposite sides of the room with their paper snowballs. At my signal they let them fly. The winning team is the one with the fewest number of snowballs on their side when time is up, so they did their best to get those snowballs on to the opposite side of the room. At my signal, they stopped throwing and two chosen collectors gathered up each team's snowballs. Here's the best part. Instead of simply counting them up, we created a visual. It was easy, meaningful, and so quick, we grabbed our snowballs and played one more time.