Math Across our Day

When a teachable moment comes up in our day, I run with it.  While reading about worms, we came to a page showing a 100 ft. ribbon snake that sits on the ocean floor.

My mind jumped to math!  I wanted to give the a visual of how long this would be.  We figured out that the average child in our crew was about 4 ft. long.  I laid the kids out on the floor, end to end.  You can see the video of this here!

Then we figured out the math.  I wrote down the 4's and said nothing more than "doubles?"  This got them thinking and we then turned the 4's into 8's.

Then we added the 8's to get 16's. Then the 16's to get 32's.  Finally we added the final two numbers with the help of the 100 grid.

We were excited to see that our "crew snake" was about as long as a ribbon snake.  We were amazed!