A New Land

Last week we were reviewing math through a story called A New Land.  This will finish up our math lessons for first grade.  The story is about a family who sets out by boat in search of new land where they can build a house, plant a garden and raise animals.  Once they find the perfect spot, the father builds the house.  Each wall requires 10 logs.  There are 4 walls.  How many logs will he need?  Each wall has 2 windows.  Each window has 2 curtains.  How many curtains are there? 

These are the problems Grant figured out on Monday, along with doing some copy work.  Getting him to do the copy work that day was like pulling teeth (as you can see from the quality below).  I think he was overwhelmed, and felt I had given him too much, so I cut back on what he had to copy that day. 

He also did some reading, and he started learning a new song in Spanish.  We continue to review the numbers and days of the week in Spanish with bean bag tosses and jump roping.  We are also continuing to work on counting by 2's, 5's and 10's.

On Tuesday the family in the story planted a garden.  Grant decided what type of fruit trees, and what type of vegetables they were going to plant.  After that he figured out how many of each kind, and then finally added up the totals of everything.  I guess I should have been more specific about keeping his numbers on the small side.  He came up with hundreds and thousands.  He did pretty good adding the hundreds together, but needed some help with the thousands.  The family will definitely be busy planting!

On Wednesday we spent a lot of time outside, so we had a shorter lesson.  We covered the type of animals the family had.  They had ducks, chickens, geese, pigs and cows.  If they had a total of 25 animals, how many did they have of each kind?

On Thursday, we talked about the bread and eggs the family eats.  The children walked into town to buy 12 loaves of bread.  Martha is 8 years old and Jon is 4 years old.  They each carried the number of loaves of the years of their age.  How many loaves did they each carry?  When they got back, they were hungry, so they cut one loaf into 12 pieces and each of the 4 family members had 2 pieces.  How many pieces did they eat?  How many pieces were left over? 

We also talked about the number of hens they had and figured out how many eggs they laid everyday, and how many the family ate each day, and how many they had left over to sell at the market.

It was a good math review, and a good way for Grant to see how math plays an important part in everyday life.