Math Fun: Counting Crocodiles

I love a good bargain. I love it even more when it's something I actually need! Over vacation I stumbled on a fantastic consignment store with tons of books for pennies, and one of them was "Counting Crocodiles" by Judy Sierra, which my kids love so much we've checked it out of the library approximately, oh, twenty-zillion times. Well, now I can stop automatically renewing my claim to the library's copy!

This is a great book, even if the rhyming at times is a little odd. It's about a clever monkey who needs to get across the crocodile-infested Sillabobble Sea to an island with a banana tree (she only has lemons on her island, yuck, and she is sick of eating them: "She ate lemons boiled and fried, / steamed, sauteed, pureed, and dried") but first she has to outsmart the crocodiles. So what does she do? She has the crocs line up to be counted. And she skips across their heads as she counts them: "Seven crocs juggling clocks, Eight crocs in polka-dot socks."

At the end of the book the crocodiles want to know how many of them there are, but the monkey won't say. So I asked my kids, "How many crocodiles are there?" and we set about figuring it out some way other than counting the crocs one by one on the pages.

I loved the looks on their faces when the answer came to them: Count by tens! But first we had to put the crocs in the Sillabobble Sea. So I took ten index cards and wrote out numbers 1-10 on them, and gave half to V-Man and half to MM. They used teddy bear counters to represent the crocs ("Three crocs rocking in a box, Four crocs building with blocks,") and put the correct number on each card, then dumped them all into the Sillabobble Sea. From there they arranged the croc/teddies in groups of then and counted the groups and then the leftovers.

So now my little monkeys do indeed know just how many crocs are in the Sillabobble Sea, and now they're insisting we do another activity inspired from the book: Cooking lemons as many ways as possible.

We'll see about that.