Home-Made Dice & a Freebie: A belated Monday Made It

Ok, so I am a little pretty late on this, but I've been busy...

Here's my Monday Made It (on Wednesday) for this week... Visit the link to see more awesome DIY  goodies!

I turned these foam cubes from the Dollar Tree.....

... into FOUR SETS of my very own SILENT dice!

Yay! My very own homemade foam dice!

Blue dice are the regular #s 1-6.

Green dice are #s 7-12

Orange dice are #s 13-18

Red dice are #s 19-24

I'm sure you're wondering, "How did she do this amazing thing?!?"

Or maybe you're not... It's really super easy, and I'm definitely not the genius who thought of this. I made these a while ago and almost thought it wasn't worth posting about since it's been done, but these little guys have been SOOOOO handy in my summer school class for practicing fact recall I just had to share. Plus, I'm throwing in a FREEBIE so I know you'll be ok with it. 

So, here's what I did...

Step 1: My lovely coworker found these little guys at the Dollar Tree and shared her idea.

Step 2: Steal  Borrow the idea from my coworker to make dice.

Step 3: Take them home to make while watching The Bachelorette.

Step 4: Open the package.

Step 5: Separate the dice by color. (The package comes with 50 cubes, almost the same number of each color.)

Step 6: Write numbers on dice using black permanent marker... Again, in case you missed it, I made the blue dice the regular #s 1-6; green dice are #s 7-12; orange dice are #s 13-18; red dice are #s 19-24. Oh, and underline your 6s and 9s so your students don't confuse the two, or claim they confused the two so they don't have to practice one or the other.

Step 7: Put each set of dice in their own separate baggies and label them.

BOOM. DONE.

So easy, right?! And they only cost $1.00 + sales tax + marker ink + 10-20 mins.

I only messed up a couple, so maybe I have 48 instead of 50 dice, and yes, I got some black marker ink on my hands. But, it was so worth it. They make NO NOISE and are great for math fact practice!



I use these games at my Math Facts station for math workshop almost every day. Unless I'm doing the cube toss games instead. The kids really enjoy both activities a whole lot more than a plain old worksheet.

I usually use the blue and green (1-6 and 7-12) dice to practice multiplication.

So then the orange and red (13-18 and 19-24) are for adding and subtracting... and I also use the blue and green for add/sub sometimes, too. Best part?? Either way you combine the dice sets, they need to regroup at least some of the time. :)

The Multiplication Dice Roll Game in action...

I'm still working on how to do division practice with dice.... Any ideas??? It's looking like it'll take a lot of planning and certain dice for each dividend. Like, have a dice with only multiples of  3, and another dice with numbers to divide it by? But, it could get too "easy" if the answer was always 3...

Seriously, any ideas or suggestions would be helpful! :)

Anyway, below you'll find a link to my set of my recording sheets for the dice roll games.

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREEBIE!

Enjoy!