I've Moved!

 I should have posted this long ago, but I moved my blog to Wordpress and write about all of our learning adventures at www.lesliejohnstone.com!  Come check it out!

Tractor Math

What do Tractors and Math have in common?  Little kids.

We had a beautiful oak die in our back yard recently.

It was home to many squirrels who barked and swatted their tails at my dog. 

Home to cardinals, mockingbirds, and bluejays along with other birds that we enjoyed watching.

But it was right next to the house. Smack dab between my neighbor and us.

It had to go.

I called my most favorite tree guys who are legit lumberjacks.

They don't have giant trucks with buckets to hoist men into the air.  They have a man who climbs up the tree with a chainsaw attached to his belt.  This lumberjack then ties himself to the tree, carefully ties the branches he will cut so they go down gently to the crew beneath, and then he cuts the enormous tree up.  In 3 hours they are leaving my house and all I am left with is a short tree stump. 

The one piece of big equipment they brought however was a tractor.

My boy was in heaven.

We stayed outside all morning long watching our lumberjacks take care of our oak.  All the while, the  tractor went back and forth delivering the cut up tree to dump truck.

My kiddos were entertained and it was done before naptime.  #winwin

Aaaaannnnnd, it was the perfect premise to our Tractor Day from our 

Farm Unit from Experience Early Learning (EEL)!

Tractor Day was filled with playing with tractors and cars, reading our new I Can Read Book and playing Tractor Math.  

Materials: die, pencil, manipulatives (pigs from EEL), and a "tractor" (EEL sent us this picture, but you could use anything including a box or a toy tractor)

How to Play: roll the die.  Using your manipulatives, place that amount into the tractor bed. Roll again.  Put that amount into the tractor bed.  Now add the two.  To challenge my Kindergartener, I whipped out some lined primary paper and had her write her math equations.

She loved this game so much!  She loved picking out her pigs each time she rolled. I think writing the equations on the lined paper really gave her this sense of accomplishing some kind of work.  It was great practice writing her numbers, and I was extremely impressed as some of these equations were starting to come to her mentally without having to count one by one.

What did the man child do all day?  Besides yelling at the window about the "Tractor" that was no longer there, he played with a toy tractor, tried to steal the pigs from the basket (leading to a sister meltdown and sharing of the pigs), played with said stolen shared pigs, and played with stickers.  

Tractor Day was enjoyed by all... including this momma.