With Veteran's Day coming up on Friday, I thought it might be fun to pull out some of the Man of the House's old army men (yes he still has them), to use as math manipulatives for the younger children(ages 5-8).To begin with we needed to count them to see how many we had. D (age 8) decided the fastest way would be to count by fives. It turns out we have 61 men of different sizes, and colors...
...perfect for the little ones to sort and arrange into patterns...
...and Venn diagrams. The subtle shades didn't show up in the pictures so well, so you'll have to take my word for it that we were comparing dark green to light green soldiers, with soldiers of both shades, who were not standing, in the middle.
Finally, I started working on division with D.
We had 61 men, so if we removed one injured fellow to the hospital, that would leave us with 60 men. Setting up 5 men as generals, how many soldiers could each general command, if all the men were divided equally among the five generals?
What if there were only 59 men? How many men would be left over after all the troops had been divided equally among the generals?
Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea.
It's great to be a homeschooler.
10 comments:
I love this! My husband still have his army men also. It's interesting because I did not save any toys from my childhood but he still has most of his!
This is my type of math!! I like using the army men as manipulatives. My James would love this.
Nice idea. C would like this.
We don't have any toys from our childhood, do you have any of yours?
I saved a few Smurfs - but those were passed to the children years ago - and never seen again :)
I love this idea! The possibilities for math activities are endless.
Nice way to combine Veteran's Day with math. Interestingly, my husband and his brother have a great aversion for all things military. It passed from their parents who were teenagers during WWII.
Natalie - That's very understandable. My maternal grandfather was in WWI and all of my mother's brothers were in later wars - two were even prisoners of war during WWII - one to the Germans and one to the Japanese, but in the end they were on the winning side - I'm sure that makes a difference. We've never been faced with a conquering army in our front yard.
I love this! My boys would go nuts for it.
I have lots of my toys from a childhood, but the kids only get them in small amounts.....
I love this. LOVE this. It's fantastic because you can adapt it to so many age levels. I'm sharing this as many ways as I can. haha. Thank you for posting! We will surely be doing this one.
We have an obscene number of toy soldiers lying around our house (actually - soldiers, pirates, knights.....thanks, Toys R Outrageously Expensive) and this sounds like a great idea since I am sick as a dog over here. Thanks for the inspiration!
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