Get your students spinning, predicting and reasoning with our SPIN AND COVER: FRUIT MARKET CHANCE GAME – a hands-on probability activity that brings the concept of chance to life through colourful fruit-themed fun! Designed for small group play, this game is a fantastic way to reinforce mathematical language and thinking around fairness, equal chance and random events. With a strong visual and tactile focus, it’s the perfect addition to your chance and data unit in Foundation through Year 2 classrooms.

Students become fruit vendors in their very own shop, each displaying a variety of fruits. Two spinner boards – one fair, one unfair – introduce students to the concept of equal and unequal chance in a way that feels natural, exciting and purposeful. With every spin, students must decide whether the outcome applies to their shop, encouraging both strategic play and deeper understanding of probability in action.

This game includes six different shop boards, each featuring six fruits, and two distinct spinners to explore variations in outcome likelihood. Setup is simple – just print, cut and laminate the shop cards and spinners. All you need to add are counters (or tokens) for each student, and you're ready to start spinning. As students play, you'll have built-in opportunities to discuss fairness, patterns of results and the role of chance in everyday events.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• ✅ Identify and describe outcomes using the language of chance
• ✅ Compare events using terms such as equal chance, more likely and less likely
• ✅ Develop an understanding of fairness in games and everyday experiences
• ✅ Practise turn-taking, logical thinking and strategic decision-making
• ✅ Make informal predictions and explain outcomes using probability vocabulary

What’s Included:

• 6 colourful Fruit Market shop boards (each featuring 6 different fruits)
• 2 spinner boards – one fair and one designed to be intentionally unequal
• Instructions for setup and gameplay
• Suggestions for post-game discussion and classroom reflection

Materials Needed:

• Printed and laminated shop cards and spinners
• 6 counters per student (or small tokens)
• Paperclip and pencil (or spinner arrow) to use with spinner boards

How to Play:

1. Each student receives one Fruit Market shop board.
2. Players take turns spinning the selected spinner (choose either the fair or unfair version).
3. If the spinner lands on a fruit shown on their board, they place one counter on that item.
4. Only one counter may be placed per spin, even if the fruit appears more than once.
5. The first student to cover all six fruits on their board wins!

Ideas for Classroom Use:

• 💡 Use during maths rotations or small group teaching blocks to reinforce chance vocabulary
• 💡 Explore fairness by playing with both spinners and comparing outcomes
• 💡 Introduce the concept of bias using the unequal spinner and spark discussion
• 💡 Encourage students to graph which fruits were spun most frequently
• 💡 Link the activity to healthy eating or fruit-themed literacy units for cross-curricular learning

Teacher Tips:

• 💛 Laminate the shops and spinners for repeated use across multiple lessons or groups
• 💛 Use sentence starters like “It is more likely that…” or “It is less likely that…” to prompt student responses
• 💛 Encourage students to keep a tally of spins and results for basic data collection
• 💛 Extend the lesson by having students design their own fair or unfair spinners
• 💛 Model gameplay explicitly to ensure students understand the mechanics before beginning independently

SPIN AND COVER: FRUIT MARKET CHANCE GAME is the perfect way to turn abstract chance concepts into hands-on learning – colourful, fair (or unfair!) and full of fruity fun!