many more

This week's curriculum story has been "Miss Many More", a 1st Grade Enki Education Math story about counting by. In the story, Many wants to make a pie like her Dad's strawberry pie, and needs to pick 100 berries. But when she starts picking strawberries one at a time, she decides it's going to take too long. So she picks cherries instead, because she can pick those two at a time. But even that takes too long, so instead she picks peas, as there are 3 peas on each side of a pod, and then realizes if she didn't stop to open the pods, she'd be picking 6 at a time. In no time, she has 100 peas, and makes her pie, but it, of course, tastes horrible. So she goes in search of a sweet fruit that she can pick swiftly -- and finds grapes hanging in 10 per bunch. But when she bakes them in a pie, they become a grape puddle with skins floating in them. Finally, she discovers that she can pick blueberries, by handfuls of 5, and finally makes a delicious pie.

After recalling the story, we drew pictures of the different fruits in the numbers we were counting by. The above picture is J's, this one here is Zoo Boy's. (Mine is last if you want to compare -- J's is pretty close to how mine is drawn, though.) We also reviewed a counting-by movement activity ("Strange Family") this week.


Then, building naturally on the story, today we practiced counting-by with blueberries. We started counting out our berries one at a time, then two, then three, then five. We counted out enough berries to make a blueberry pie.






The boys work on fluting our pie.













Ta da!! And it tastes even better than it looks!

Don't you just love math?!?!








My "Many More" drawing. The blue squiggly arrow reaching across my page was a continuation from Zoo Boy's drawing -- it connects with his drawing to the title "Miss Many More" because, as he pointed out, my blueberry bush has "many more" blueberries than his. I thought that was pretty clever! (He did ask permission before drawing on my drawing.)