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.
How fun! I need to track down the doubles book I made when teaching. The kids lessons recently have been all about doubles, and I know they'd love it.
ReplyDeleteThis is a neat idea that I think could be adapted to all sorts of math problems
ReplyDeleteThat's great to use baseball for math problems. I'm sure she will retain a lot of it that way.
ReplyDeleteWe've played some online math games before, but I never thought to make one ourselves - fun!
ReplyDeleteI admit I found the baseball math a bit confusing, but it's probably because I don't know much about baseball :) It's funny how our kids sometimes react to the activities that we think they will like, but at least Selena stuck with it.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to add some maths into the artwork. Love her drawing, she did very well!
ReplyDeleteWould love for you to take part in my new link up Kids Get Crafty over at Red Ted Art. Link goes up every Wednesday... current link is http://www.redtedart.com/?p=3056
Hope to see you there!
Maggy
Red Ted Art
What a great project!!! So creative :)
ReplyDelete"Thank you" and thank you for putting badge up and following.. now following you too (keep forgetting I have google connect now!!)
ReplyDeleteSee you next week!
Maggy
Wow! This is a great way to teach math. Very clever.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter gets bored with coloring often. She never gets bored with paint though - she likes to make messes!
I love how you covered the bases with math.
ReplyDelete