contest for a crown, part one

It's a contest for the crown

Who's the greatest one around?

-from "Contest for a Crown: Greater and Less Game", Enki Education 1st Grade Academic Activity

We've been working on greater than and less than this week, and I was going to wait until the end of the week to post about it, but at this point I've got a lot of photos to share, so I figured I'd be better off doing two posts rather than one. So here's what we've done to this point.

We read the "Contest for a Crown" story, which very lightly introduces the concept of greater than/less than. This first picture is my drawing from the story after recall the next day. You can see the greater/less than symbol in the drawing, as the "true" (greater) Prince opens the magic chest, and the "false" (lesser) Prince cannot. This was the proof the people in the story needed to know who their true ruler was.

Here's J's drawing. I particularly like the grimace of effort his "false" prince has on his face as he tries to lift the lid of the chest!








Zoo Boy's drawing. He's shown a lot of improvement in drawing the entire picture himself, although he's still asking me to write the title for him. (Although he did agree to write the first letter of the title.)






Today we made two greater than/less than symbols, with a crown on top, to play a few games with the concepts. I cut the symbols out of foam board, the boys colored in the crowns.





I set up a chart with the "greater" prince from our story/drawing on one side and the "lesser"on the other. Then the kids and I discussed all the attributes of a prince. They came up with bravery, being a good hunter, honesty, generosity, loving, rich, and helpful. Then the kids took turns placing our small symbol on the chart for each line, and I wrote in the answer (the symbol) on the chart. These were purposely all positive attributes, so the answer was always the "greater" prince.

Then I said "What would happen if 'mean' was on our chart?" Zoo Boy instantly flipped the symbol over to show that the "lesser" prince was greater in meanness than the "greater" one. He asked if we could make a chart like that, so we did, coming up with other traits the "lesser" prince was actually greater in. Mean, selfish, darkness, horrible, and greedy were on our negative attributes list.

Next, I set up various pairs of things around the living room, and we visited the pairs with our large symbol. The kids took turns placing the symbol in the appropriate direction to tell the "truth" of the relationship. In this photo, J places the symbol to show which block is great in squareness. (Zoo Boy then had a turn, flipping the symbol over the other way to indicated which piece was greater in brownness.)

Zoo Boy places his symbol to indicate that the scooter board on the right in greater in yellowness than the scooter board on the left. Other attributes we looked at in various parings were length, weight, softness, and age. I finished with amounts -- I had two piles of beanbags. The kids didn't make a single mistake with any of the comparisons, and with absolutely no input from me other than to suggest some attributes to look at.

Tomorrow we'll take the concept to actual numbers, and the kids will get to write the symbol themselves on a comparison chart.