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.

Math Fun: The Doorbell Rang

And the doorbell rang...

I'm big into "living books" -- books that make subjects come alive through stories. We use them for history, science and general literature, but until now I've relied on dry old math workbooks for math (and really, aren't they all dry and boring?). Then I came across a series of very cool math reading books by Stuart Murphy called MathStart. They demonstrate mathematical concepts through stories -- odd and even are explained through missing mittens, subtraction is demonstrated through monsters playing musical chairs, 3D shapes are incorporated into a story about rocketships and intergalactic beasts. I love these books.

And so, it turns out, does my math-phobic daughter. She probably doesn't realize there's math involved. As for V-Man -- I can't tell you how many times I've read the one about the intergalactic beast.

What's even better is that these seem to have helped the kids pick up math concepts, so they're not just empty "you can feel good as a parent because you're reading about math" books. On the last page they have a whole bunch of suggested activities that are actually fun.

There are other similar books, too. One I found that the kids adore is called "The Doorbell Rang" by Pat Hutchins. In it, a mom has served her two kids twelve cookies... and then the doorbell rings. Two more kids come in, and they have to divide the cookies. Then the doorbell rings... you get the picture. So one afternoon at snacktime I set twelve candy peach slices on the table with two napkins for MM and V-Man... and then the doorbell rang (me going "ding-dong!"). You guessed it -- two more napkins needed "cookies," and then two more. They had a ball dividing the cookies up between their imaginary friends.

When the doorbell finally stopped ringing I told them they could eat the candy. And guess what?

They didn't want to eat. They wanted the doorbell to ring some more.