illness in the land of jewel

This week we were working with place value again. We started with the Enki math story "Illness in the Land of Jewel," which is based around the same characters from our first place value story. This time, the King is sick and as Tricky Mischief canvasses the town to find a cure, she discovers that many of the townspeople are sick also. A little boy, climbing back up the cliffs from sea (as shown in both J's drawing, above, and Zoo Boy's drawing, below), has the cure, but the King won't take it until they've found enough cure for the entire kingdom. (A fun note, when I read the title of the this story, the boys both gasped and said "oh no!" They were very excited to revisit the Kingdom of Jewel again, and at the end of the story, Zoo Boy said "I can't wait to count the sea purses!")

Our "magic sea purses," the cure for the illness. (Ok, so really they are beans, and my kids know that, but they were more than happy to pretend that they are magic sea purses -- in fact, they didn't even question it at the time, although Zoo Boy did ask later what a magic sea purse would actually look like.)

But did we have enough for all of the sick people in the Kingdom?

So we pulled out our counting boxes and counted up the number of sea purses we'd collected. And here's our result, which the boys then wrote down on a piece of paper I'd prepared in advance:

The following day, I told them that Tricky Mischief had also counted sea purses, and came up with 3,573 of them. Giving them another prepared sheet of paper, the boys added Tricky's total to their total to get a grand total of 4,986 sea purses. Which just so happens to be exactly the number of sea purses the villagers collected in our story.

We'll be working more with place value and adding large numbers in the coming week, and will do some subtracting as well. But for right now, there will be no carrying or borrowing -- that will come the next time we approach the topic, and there's another story to help that process along.