Can you tell we have been hard at work mastering our elapsed time skills? This is something that can get pretty boring pretty quickly because of how much practice you HAVE to do. I started searching for more ideas to make it FUN and INTERESTING, and I came across this great blog post from Thinking of Teaching. She had the kids play a version of Amazing Race, and I thought it was such a great idea!  I took it a little bit further and made it into a “real” Amazing Race, where they are solving problems to race throughout the different continents.

Creating the Game

One of my main goals as we were working on this game, which came at the very end of our elapsed time unit, was to help them become more comfortable with multi-step elapsed time problems. Every single continent had a multi-step problem they had to solve in order to move on.

Making Passports

I started by creating a passport for each of my students. They were going to be solving problems on all seven continents (and visiting the US twice, once when they depart, and once when they arrive back home). I found stamps and stickers that they could use when they completed the problem at that continent. They *loved* this, and the buy-in was amazing! They worked so hard for their stamps and stickers.

At each stop, they had a multi-step problem to solve that had to do with a country. I made it into a colorful poster using a half sheet of anchor chart paper. I then hung them all up around the room.

Each stop had a small white bin (.99 from Party City and I can think of 1,000 other things I am going to do with them) with their stamps and half sheets of paper. They did all of their work on the half sheets of paper and submitted their answers into the bin as well. This way, the only thing they had to carry from continent to continent was their passport.

That’s it! SUPER simple, but the engagement during this activity was off the charts. They loved it!

Click HERE to download the file to create your own posters, or enter your email below to join my freebie library, where I have an interactive, DIGITAL version of this elapsed time Amazing Race resource!

You can check out MORE posts and elapsed time resources below by clicking on each image.