Last week, I found an old tweet that I had bookmarked from Sarah Carter from her math equals love blog about a routine called question stack. Students start with a problem, and solve it to find the next question in the stack. I used it last year as part of a breakout edu box, and hadn’t returned to it since, but I had a few ideas this week to make it a bit more visual for my middle school classroom.
This year, I’ve been making a monthly pilgrimage to Value Village to look for board games that I can incorporate into my classroom. It has led to some fun classroom applications for Jenga, Battleship, Operation, Candyland, and now Slamwich (Settlers of Catan coming soon). Slamwich is a card game where players stack various sandwich ingredients on top of one another. For my application, I used the art to make the question stack routine much more (or less) appetizing. My original idea was to print questions and answers on color copies of cards from the game, but I quickly realized that would be a waste of colored ink, especially when you only use the cards one lesson per year.
My big breakthrough came with these toploader card protectors. Using these card holders means that the art could be affixed to the plastic sleeves, and the question/answer decks could be swapped out depending on the skill at hand.
I copied the cards from the Slamwich game on our school’s color copier at 110% onto sticker paper and laminated them before slapping the sandwich ingredient stickers onto the plastic sleeves
Finally, I made my first problems sets for my Algebra 1 classroom, and let them rip in class. Kids loved the visuals and loved complaining about the combinations of ingredients as they uncovered each new card. (Onion plus jelly! ewwww) I’m hopeful this routine can become a regular!
Some resources (formatted question cards that fit into the plastic sandwich sleeves) if you’re into that sort of thing:
Cantankchris Math 