Roll, Play! Dice Learning Games – Teachers Telling Tales

Inexpensive, easily portable and with endless possibilities for games, dice are an essential in the educator’s toolbox. They are adaptable for differing ages and abilities and transcend language barriers.

A small tub full of dice is relatively cheap, light to carry and has endless possibilities!

Dicebreaker!

Last year, I had a wonderful experience supporting with some refugee children from Afghanistan on their first days in a school in Bristol. A boy, about seven years old was wary of joining the other children; he stayed at the back of the class and took his time to observe the class and get his bearings. Finally, I engaged him through rolling large dice together. Without any shared language, we soon established a simple game that whoever rolled the highest was the winner. Soon we were exclaiming our triumph or disappointment in our own languages, learning numbers and most importantly, sharing smiles and laughter. It got me thinking about the potential of dice for play and learning and interested in their history.

In this blog, I will outline some facts about dice, tips for using them and links to resources.

Did you know the dots on dice are known as ‘pips’? Read on for more facts about dice and tips for using them in learning games.

Top Tips

Choosing Dice

As well as the traditional 6-sided die, dice come in a range of materials, shapes with varying numbers of faces and corresponding pips, numbers or symbols.
Materials: I bought my favourite set of dice while teaching in Cambodia, they are hand made in colourful cotton. Large and soft enough to play with indoors and outdoors and perfect for younger children. While working in a volunteer team in the Maldives, we produced a resource pack of dice games for schools and the teachers made dice using offcuts of wood. While I generally prefer natural materials for learning resources, in the case of dice I find plastic is a good choice – it’s durable and easy to clean. The colourful, transparent dice are attractive to children. Interestingly, did you know casinos often use transparent dice to show that they are not loaded?

Shapes and Numbers

As well as the standard traditional six-sided cube with dots (pips), there are other common shapes and numbers available, including:
– tetrahedron (4 faces)
– octahedron (8 faces)
– pentagonal trapezohedron (10 faces)
– dodecahedron (12 faces)
– icosahedron (20 faces).

Traditional dice with dots enable children to practise the important skill of subitising, (learning to visualise numbers and recognise amounts without counting). Dice with numerals are also useful for number recognition. Having dice including zero and / or with numbers up to twelve is good for times tables games.

Adaptations:
– Add stickers to cover existing numbers and make the numbers lower or higher.
– Make your own dice using net templates (see download link below).
– Order custom dice.
– For visually impaired learners tactile dice can be made or purchased.

**D-eyes!** maker and photographer unknown

Tips for Playing Dice Games

Remote Teaching?

Use an online random dice generator:

calculator.net allows you to choose any number of dice to roll, vary the numbers of sides on the dice and find the sum and product.

online-stopwatch.com has a fantastic range of dice, including a shaker and my favourite, the pop-up die.

Ideas and Resources

Dice are just random generators; as well as numbers they can also feature words or pictures making them a valuable tool for a range of activities and subjects. For example, the My Amazing Monster resource pack I created uses dice to generate a monster name as a phonics activity and to select story elements for a creative writing exercise.
However, the area where dice really shine is in mathematics. There are so many games that can be played where maths skills can be sneaked in almost without students noticing!

When I started online tutoring in 2020, I incorporated lots of dice games into sessions as they made great starters, brain breaks or upbeat ways to end lessons. Now that I am delivering tuition in schools I have continued to use them; finding and adapting more games along the way. I have compiled the games I found, adapted and created into a document for easy reference. It can be cropped into 30 cards for easy reference, perfect for giving to adults working with a group in class. As well as simple instructions, the cards have suggestions for variations to make games simpler or more challenging to meet the needs of students.
Skills include: calculation using all four operations, comparing numbers, place value, doubling, odd and even numbers, times tables, square numbers, number bonds, probability, rounding, power of 10, negative numbers, fractions, sequences, area and perimeter.