eight

The bigger the number, the greater the trouble,

Except when the little one you can double.

If you pair two fours you don't have to wait

In no time at all, you've built up eight.

from Number Qualities Verse, Enki Education 1st Grade Academic Activity

We've been working with the number "8" the past couple of days, feeding off the same story, The Evil Giant, that we used for working with "6", since "8" is a doubling of "4" (the way "3" was a doubling of "6"). The kids caught onto the "double" and saw it easier this time, so they are definitely getting the hang of the concept. We didn't do another story recall, but we did look for the "8" in the story and found it -- 4 daughters, who each married a prince, so it doubled the 4 to 8. We also talked about 8 in our lives, and the kids readily identified a spider as having 8 legs (4 on each side -- two sets of 4 is 8), and the number of planets in our solar system, which at first I didn't think was a direct double, but the kids both pointed out that there are 4 inner planets and 4 outer planets, separated by an asteroid belt. Hence, 4 on each side of the belt, is 8 total. COOL!! (Never have I been so grateful to scientists for de-planetizing poor little Pluto!!)

Sticking with tradition, I drew from the story.









J was too excited about the other "8"s in our lives, and chose to draw a spider and the 8 planets.







Zoo Boy also drew the planets, as well as the sun, the asteroid belt, and Pluto too, just for good measure.

Today we wrote the number (a toughie, what with the extreme mid-line crossing and all!), our dots (2 sets of 4, of course!), and our geometric figure, which was an 8-pointed star, made up of two squares (the geometric figure for "4" from last week). Zoo Boy asked right away for me to draw in dots and numbers for him to follow, and he was able to draw the figure correctly the first time. J has not had any problem with any of our geometric figures to date.