rabbit and crocodile

Our math work for the second half of this week was focused around the Enki Education Math Story, "Rabbit and Crocodile", in which a clever rabbit outsmarts a hungry crocodile by betting him that he has more friends. The crocodile calls all of his friends in, they stretch from shore to shore, and rabbit counts them as he hops across their backs to reach the other side and safety. After recalling the story yesterday, we made these cute paper bag rabbit puppets, which we used in a math game today.


We also incorporated our digit cards from Wednesday in our game. The kids took turns drawing from two piles to make a two digit number.












(The only cards in the first pile were "0" and "1" so the drawn number was never larger than 19.)

Then they had to count out that number of "crocodiles" (silk scarves) and lay them across the living room floor. They did an impressive job of figuring out how many scarves to add or subtract for each subsequent number, despite the fact that I've not discussed the concepts of addition or subtraction at all. In fact, during our next math block, we'll introduce these concepts via story. As is typical of kids their age, they are already discovering the use of the math concepts prior to me labeling them as "addition" and "subtraction" -- it will be a simple task to give them the names for what they already know later.

Then both kids, with their rabbit puppets on their arms, jumped from crocodile to crocodile, counting out loud as they went.

The game was great fun, and the boys had a blast. They've requested to play it again with The Map Man tomorrow.