Since my older kids were studying Egypt, D was naturally very interested in pyramids and mummies. It was time for the math gnomes to take a trip! D decided they would travel by rocket.
Following is a brief summary of our block, to show how you can make any theme fit specific math concepts....
*When the gnomes arrived, they decided to visit the Giza plateau. Those 3 giant pyramids are awesome! We decided to see how much treasure could fit into each one. The littlest pyramid can only hold 9 treasure bags. When we got more than 9, we had to make a bundle of 10 and move it to the next pyramid. We tried all different numbers of treasure bags (Gnome Add was a big help), until D understood place value.
*The pharaohs lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. D is writing all the numbers from 1 to 1000 on a LONG strip of paper. (I never realized how much the writing would help with place value, but it was a good eye opener.)
L (now 10th grade) asked why she didn’t get to learn math this way!
*When you have big numbers (years, stones in the pyramid, workers to build the temples…), it helps to add and subtract in columns instead of lines. D learned to write his problems a new way.
*And when Gnome Add has too many numbers in one column (pyramid), he can carry over to the next. Thus we learned renaming. (We did this with manipulatives too.)
L (now 10th grade) asked why she didn’t get to learn math this way!
This is awesome. I am always very interested in those math gnomes. Do you have pictures of the pyramids, long piece of paper, etc?
ReplyDeleteOkay, here are some photos :) It's hard to see, but the pyramids are labeled 1, 10, and 100. (That's from right to left, of course.) The pyramids and the long paper are both in D's Main Lesson book for 2nd grade math.
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