60-Second Strategy: 3 Noses

At Arts and Letters United 305, a Pre-K to 8th-grade public school in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the students play theater games throughout the year in every grade. In addition to helping students develop social and emotional skills, make deeper connections to academic content, and exercise executive functions, theater games can also make great warm-up activities to get learners primed to dive into the curriculum. In teacher Katie Giordano’s 4th grade classroom, one of the students’ favorites is 3 Noses, an active math warm-up game they learned from Child’s Play NY, an arts organization that helps schools integrate theater and improvisation as powerful tools for education. 

In 3 Noses, the game starts with everyone getting up and moving around the room. Then, Giordano calls out a number and a body part: “7 arms!” or “28 fingers!” for example. Students scramble into small groups as quickly as they can, adding up the body parts to arrive at the correct number. When Giordano rings a bell to make everyone freeze, the students share out their reasoning group by group. They can use any method for calculating their totals: skip counting, multiplication, adding, or whatever comes to mind first. Sometimes Giordano adds a motion to a round, like hopping, skipping, or twirling, to bump up the excitement.  

The game is fast-paced, kinetic, and fun—an excellent example of the power of embodied cognition to make learning stick and a great way to practice math facts, since students must explain their thinking after each round. It also encourages kindness and inclusion, as students make adjustments to ensure every classmate fits into a group.

For more theater games specifically to support math learning, check out the article Child’s Play NY founder Jocelyn Greene wrote for Edutopia, “Using Theater Games to Support Students’ Math Skills.”