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Last week we talked about the pros and cons of competition in schools. If you do decide to implement competitive activities in your classroom, try to pick competitions that include everyone, and keep all of your students engaged. These types of activities can be labelled as ‘healthy competitions.’ Here are 6 examples of healthy school competition ideas you can try out in your classroom:

1. Have students compete in teams

When defining “healthy competition,” the leadership notebook highlights the importance of encouraging teamwork. Obviously, team-based school competition is very valuable because it engages kids through an exciting learning environment, while encouraging cooperation. Working toward a common goal as a team could help decrease self-consciousness and anxiety, which is often found in competition settings (and one of the ‘cons’ noted in our aforementioned article about competitions in schools).

An example of team-based competition could be dividing your class in half for a game of Social Studies trivia, or into groups of four to create the catchiest rhyme for a Science unit summary.

2. Give all the students a chance to win

When designing a healthy school competition, it is a good idea to make sure everyone has a significant chance of actually winning the game.

For example, you don’t want a kid getting kicked out of a game if they get the very first question wrong, or miss a shot at the beginning of a hockey game. By including everyone throughout the competition, they are more likely to stay engaged (and excited to participate).

3. Introduce rewards, based on effort

Not every competition has to be standardized across the board. Try having kids enter a competition that is personalized for their individual strengths, as suggested by Edquarter.

This could include students picking their favourite subject, or a specific goal they want to work on. Their progress in the competition can be measured according to the amount of effort they have put into their work. You can be creative and tailor this general idea to the needs of your class, as long as the main idea is to encourage kids to try their best.

4. Have students focus on personal academic goals

If you do want to have students participate in an academic competition, Classroom suggests you should “encourage students to beat their own previous individual scores.” This is a great idea, because instead of stressing over competing against another student for the better grade, students will be competing against no one other than themselves. This way, they can only get better and better!

5. Test out competition based on chance, rather than ability

Math games are a great way to implement this healthy competition idea. For example, grade 3 students learning multiplication can pair up with two dice each. Each round, the two students roll their dice at the same time. Each student multiplies the numbers on their dice together, and whoever has the higher product gets a point. This way, they are still practicing multiplication in a fun game setting without the competition being focused on each student’s speed or math ability. Instead, it is left up to chance. This is a great activity if you have a class of students with a variety of math skills, or if you are a parent looking to play a math game with your child.

Feel free to modify any of these healthy school competition ideas to suit the needs of your classroom or tutoring group. And if you haven’t already checked it out, here’s our last article on the pros and cons of competition in schools.

See related posts on our blog:

How to teach conflict resolution to kids

7 brain games for kids

Should children join a spelling bee contest in Canada? (Part 1: the pros)

Should children join a spelling bee contest in Canada? (Part 2: the cons)

How can we teach social competence to teens?

Kids fight. It’s human nature; we have disagreements all the time, even as adults. But learning how to handle each other’s differences is no doubt an important part of life. Tolerance can keep mankind working as a unit. And let’s face it: we’re social creatures. We need each other, kids need each other, and to meet that need, we have to learn to get along. So, how do you teach conflict resolution to kids? In this article, we’ll discuss some tips for doing so as a tutor, teacher or parent.

Understand where conflict originates, and why it should be discussed in the first place

This point may seem obvious. But there are some good ways of articulating or describing conflict and its need to be resolved. For kids, getting it ‘into their heads’ might take a while. As this article states, “like violence, nonviolence is learned behaviour.”

So, follow-through may be needed, for when the lessons become applicable. When you read resources online for teaching conflict resolution to kids, you’ll see that most of them surround the real experiences kids are going through, or have in their memory. Thus, the subject requires application to be learned.

But for a teacher, tutor or parent, having this ‘talk’ with your students can reduce the amount of time you need to spend as the ‘mediator’ or ‘judge.’ Petty fights among kids can cause them to lose focus on the more important lessons you’re trying to teach, or get the whole class through. You won’t want a bunch of annoyed, disturbed and outright angry kids in a classroom, causing more disruption either.

And, as mentioned above, kids need these skills to survive on their own one day. Helping them act as independent problem solvers is a major goal when teaching conflict resolution.

Develop or use online lesson plans for teaching conflict resolution to kids

Whether paid or free, the Internet is of course, full of open educational resources you can use to develop lessons on conflict resolution with your group of kids.

In addition to ones linked to in the article above, here are some to get you started:

Many Ways to Resolve Conflict

Resolving Conflicts

Teach kids to ask the right questions when resolving conflict

One way or another, parties who are angered by conflict need to find a personal solution. Whether that solution turns into violence and more fighting, or peace and resolution depends on how they handle conflict in the first place.

Here we’ll ‘steal’ a chapter from psychologists who use the practice of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). CBT is a method that explores how someone feels, thinks or acts, and the reasons why. It then helps them identify solutions to those problem tendencies, for long term change. When dealing with anger, CBT is a researched, established method for making a difference in someone’s life. To use a colloquial description, think of CBT as a way of ‘retraining’ the brain.

So, why are we bringing this up? Because, conflict resolution requires a way of thinking and looking at a problem that goes beyond the initial feelings of anger. To do this, you have to challenge yourself with questions. And the more people in a situation of conflict that are willing to do this, the better.

For example, see how this site, dedicated to conflict resolution, presents questions for conflicted parties to ask themselves. Questions include even first asking if a person wants to resolve a conflict. And then, it goes deeper to next steps, such as finding a fair, negotiable compromise.

This type of conflict resolution is a trait to be learned, as seen on the aforementioned site’s summary of skills on this issue. For example, asking the kids in your class to focus on the positives, instead of the negatives. For this, they need to first see how conflict can be turned into “creative opportunities.” They also need to dig deep to find out if perhaps, the conflict arose because of unapparent ‘seed’ issues (like, perhaps they are truly angry about something else, or very tired, or ‘hangry’).

In this relationship worksheet for conflict resolution, angry parties learn skills like focusing on a problem, instead of a person. They also learn to communicate better, so they don’t further exacerbate a problem. Our experiences can tell us that most of the time, people aren’t ‘born’ to handle things this way!

Teach kids the right vocabulary for conflict resolution

When teaching conflict resolution skills to kids, you’ll come across a lot of vocabulary surrounding the subject. These one-word lines can be useful memorization aids, to give kids a ‘toolbox’ of ideas to apply when they encounter conflict in the future. You’ll find these on the aforementioned articles we’ve linked to. They include words like “negotiate,” “arbitrate,” “litigate” and “mediate.” Depending on how old the kids are which you are teaching, you may want to start with vocabulary definitions. This can also be a way to ease-in to the topics of asking students to define situations when they could use those strategies.

To conclude: kids can become their own problem solvers, if we teach them how

Finally, as a concluding word, we should mention that our teaching kids of conflict resolution should come with good examples for them to follow. The skills taught above are knowledge-based. But most of this topic involves experience, as we’ve mentioned earlier. And so, while you can teach kids any number of facts, eventually it can come down to what they see and model around them. The good news is that since conflict resolution is a skill, and not a natural-born talent, there is hope for all of us!

We’ll bet that when Disney came out with the movie, The Queen of Katwe (or if you read the book earlier), kids everywhere must have been inspired to pick up the board game of chess as a hobby. And it’s always great to teach kids a topic they’re interested in.

Surely, learning chess has a lot to teach about strategy, life and mental exercise. But there’s another timeless game that’s just as old as chess, with more to give. Ever thought of teaching backgammon math lessons to your pupils?

Below are math ideas you can teach kids by playing backgammon.

Teach the math of dice by playing backgammon

This can be as simple as learning how to add up two numbers. But it can also show how a limited set of numbers can create many possibilities of combinations.

This resource teaches backgammon dice statistics, moves, and odds in great detail.

So, with two dice, you have 36 possibilities of numbers. And that leads us to teaching math probability…

Use backgammon rolls to teach math probabilities

As the above resource states,

Understanding the true probabilities of dice rolls can greatly improve your tactical play, by letting you accurately assess the risk of leaving blots, and the chances of hitting and covering points. It also helps you to play strategically, by telling you how to distribute your pieces around the board in order to make the largest number of potential dice rolls work well for you. Probabilities are the secret of why good players seem to get more ‘lucky’ rolls than beginners.”

You see, math is not useless!

When you roll two dice instead of one when playing backgammon, your mathematical probability changes. As this article also explains so well, calculating probability in backgammon can show kids a strategy for determining possible outcomes. In fact, it’s a great simple way to start teaching math probabilities, or to introduce the application of fractions. They can use this information to make decisions about where to move their checkers on the board, in order to win.

Kids can practice doing math calculations in their head with backgammon

With backgammon, players aren’t allowed to use tools to make calculations – not even a pencil and paper. But as this player mentions in his ode to backgammon math, “odds and percentages” are oh so necessary to becoming a great player. But it’s not as hard as people may at first believe. He notes:

The more you do the math, the easier it becomes.  It’s like any other learned skill.  At first I got frustrated counting pips, and now I can do it much faster and easier…especially after learning some shortcuts…

“I hated calculating match equities, and to do it right used to take me well over 10 minutes some times.  Now, I can pretty much figure out most match equities in a few seconds.”

Along with doing calculations in the head, backgammon players also learn memorization skills. As the above author explains, the more you know about how backgammon math works, the easier you can make general estimates on the fly. This is also a math skill, and a life skill for kids to learn. Once they learn principles, they can learn to apply those principles in multiple situations. Isn’t that what math tests are all about?

Backgammon math lessons get more complex as you advance your game

We’ve covered only a few of the math skills used in backgammon. However, backgammon math is so interesting and applicable to math theory, computer scientists have even studied it! And, as this article delves into it, you can see there is more to it, which can turn into advanced math lessons for your students. In life, this game can teach that while ‘luck’ can explain some things, strategy can be applied to improve your odds.

See related posts on our education blog:

• Focused math lesson — Teach students statistics using baseball
• Focused math lesson: Teaching kids math with cars
• Focused math lesson — using bowling to teach math to students
• Focused lesson — teach kids math and meteorology with barometers