stART/Baseball Math

Selena enjoyed Mice At Bat by Kelly Oechsli, that we read it a few times this week. This is a rather long story and takes a couple of sittings to get through the entire book, but it is a cute story about two teams of mice out to play baseball. One team has a secret to assure they win the game, and that is a real rat. The other team is not out of the game that quick though and at the end of the game comes in with a bat that is so big, it takes almost the entire team to swing it.

After Selena and Papa had worked on math skills while watching baseball, then reading this book I thought it would be fun to make a baseball math chart. Selena really is not into arts and crafts this year, and really doesn’t care if we do them or not. I drew out a baseball diamond on a piece of card stock and had even made small baseballs that I thought Selena could use as a manipulative on her decorated baseball field. We didn’t quite get that far but Selena was quite shocked to realize the number of players on the field for a team is just enough to do her addition facts from 1 – 10.

It took me a little while to get it through to Selena that I wanted her to color in the field wit green like grass. I colored the first small section, and Selena reluctantly went to work to color the rest. When she finally said she had enough coloring, I reached for the baseballs I had made, but Selena informed me she was done. I informed her not until we at least got the math on her picture. She watched as I put a + 1 on the bat and numbered the players in order on the field. She then got a little curious and did help with the addition.

This is what her final project looked like minus the little baseballs I made. As I said though Selena did think it was pretty cool that by the time we added one to each player we actually finished all of her number 1 addition facts through 10. We will keep this on the wall, and I hope that she will eventually want the baseballs that I made so that she can have fun playing with this the way I had planned.

To see more stART projects stop over by A Mommy’s Adventures.

I am also linking up to Red Ted Art’s.