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Bonus Box
By Rick Morris
The Bonus Box is a simple classroom activity for encouraging your students to face the challenge of mathematics during their spare time. The puzzles presented–sounds better than problems presented, doesn’t it?–are such that they can be completed in less than ten minutes. By allowing your students the opportunity to focus on just a single aspect of math for a brief period of time, you will encourage them to master critical math skills in a manageable way.
The first step is to set up a Bonus Box area. The top of a bookcase placed near a wall will do. Set your Bonus Box and some scratch paper on the top shelf. Mount a small bulletin board on the wall for pinning up your Bonus Box puzzles.
Create your puzzle on a piece of 12 X 18 manila drawing paper. Then, at some point during the beginning of your day, introduce the puzzle to your class. Let them know that solving the puzzle whenever they have completed their regular assignments is a good use of free time. (We actually call it E.T., Extra Time or Educational Time.) Since some of your students may wish to work together on these puzzles, you might want to discuss and decide that issue together.
The next day, at the beginning of your math lesson, take down yesterday’s puzzle, and clip it to the chalkboard. Solving the puzzle as a class activity is a great way to begin the day’s new math lesson. This is especially true when the puzzles are based on previous lessons, which I recommend. Write the answer(s) on the board for reference.
Have someone bring you the entries from the Bonus Box. Have them also stick around to unfold them since there is likely to be a high incidence of “origamied” puzzle entries. Another option would be to hand the Bonus Box submissions to a student so that the papers can be unfolded, stacked up, and ready for you to process.
Check each entry and announce names of correct solvers. After all entries have been checked, pass out coupons or some simple prize to the winners.
Opportunity: Using a Check Off List–a roster of names or a grade sheet will also work–have one of your students keep a record (+ and –) of correct and incorrect solutions. By doing this, you’ll end up with a simple record of not only who is solving these mathematical challenges but also who is attempting to solve them: a partial indication of their individual effort in math.
