Million Minute Family Challenge

Bringing Board Games to the Classroom

Sep 10, 2007 Debbie DeSpirt

Teach lessons to your students while participating in the million minute family challenge with your class.

Goal

Million minute family challenge commences September 1, 2007 and ends on December 31, 2007. The objective of the challenge is for the United States to reach the goal of playing board games for 1 million minutes in 4 months.

Participants

Families, church groups, schools, neighbors and all other groups are allowed to participate in the million minute family challenge.

Why Participant?

Participating in the challenge is a great opportunity to teach kids how to reach a goal and more importantly to get to know their family and community. Playing games build trust in relationships, teaches communication and social skills. As well, it may teach language, math, and problem solving depending on the board game. Lastly, participating is fun.

Record Minutes

Keep a record of the minutes your group plays and log them at million minute family challenge website. Groups will log their game time for their state.

Lesson Plans

How Long is a Million Minutes?

Students problem solve to discover how many hours (16 666.6), days (694.4), weeks (99.2), months (22.8), and years (1.9) in a million minutes. As well, students can decide what they are able to do in a million minutes based upon estimation of an activity. Teacher will provide a few examples of things down in 1 million minutes. For example, a student will spend 1 million minutes at school from first grade to their sophomore year in high school.

Bulletin Board Idea: Students draw a picture of an activity that they will do for 1 million minutes.

Board Games Inventions

Students create a board game that is relevant to a topic they are learning in class. Students may create a version of trivia pursuit on Ancient Civilization or a game of password with spelling words.

History of Board Games

Students research games played in other time periods. Students recreate the game and teach the class how to play the game.

Examples: Mancala, Senet, and Go

Math

Students learn how to order the numbers of minutes completed on the million minute family challenge from highest to lowest. Students calculate the amount of minutes played per person based on the information provided for each state. Students learn about mathematical concepts such as mean, mode, and range.

Marketing Strategies

Students decide on a marketing strategy to get more students involved in the million minute family challenge. Students will present their concept to the class and implement the strategy.

Classroom Games

Have students create games based on conventional games or to reproduce an ancient game. Students will be happy to spend time on creating a game for their classmates. Once the games are completed, it is best to laminate and to create a storage box for each game to ensure pieces do not get lost. As well, students must create instructions for the game with diagrams.

The copyright of the article Million Minute Family Challenge in Teacher Tips/Training is owned by Debbie DeSpirt. Permission to republish Million Minute Family Challenge in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Monopoly