Decimal subtraction and yards to feet conversion

So, since our first day of Wii game play on Halloween Nicole has given the students a couple of lessons on subtracting decimals and on converting between yards and feet. Both of these are important to our game play because you can do both of these things while playing Wii Golf. If you have read past blog posts you know that these two issues made it more difficult to play with the 4th grade the first time we tried. So, Nicole gave the students a quick lesson about lining up the decimal points and doing straight subtraction. Then she discussed with them about how many feet were in a yard and how to go about figuring out multiples of that conversion. This made our second attempt at playing Wii Golf much more fluid.

According to Nicole, the class began the same way, with the students all getting out paper and pencils. Nicole again ran the room from the front. However, I wasn't able to be there at the beginning of class (I was working on a computer issue in another room with a guest speaker). Much to my enjoyment (and maybe a little surprise), Nicole had gotten started without me and really was rolling right along! When I got in the classroom (about 10 minutes late), the students were coming up and swinging then doing the math at their seats. When we got to a conversion problem (45 yards till the green became 17.5 feet) Nicole led the class. First, she rounded the 17.5 feet up to 18 feet (a multiple of 3). Then we figured out how many yards was in 18 feet and then did the subtraction. (Yes, you could go the other way and figure out how many feet were in 45 yards and then do the subtraction, teacher choice there). Soon there after we were able to also practice subtraction with decimals. We went from 17.5 feet to the hole to 6.8 feet. The students lined up their decimals and proceeded to subtract. As Nicole asked for the answer it took a couple of times for the students to get the correct vocabulary (10 feet and 7 tenths). I am sure that this will get better with practice.
The students were again excited to play and we still kept them involved in the process for the whole class period. I again heard several "this is cool", and "good hits" during the games. All in all, another successful day of game play in the classroom.