Our first Mathematical Quest of the year took us to the magical land of Math-a-lot. The Navigators and the Spirits gathered together and were given an open-ended math task to figure out a better way to count all the people coming to the king-sized birthday party for King Arthur. Over the course of two days we went from utter chaos to an orderly way of keeping track of all the people. We then had a great discussion of what worked best, what didn't work, how we worked together, the different ways we kept track and how the base ten system works.
The letter that was awaiting us as we came to math class
The book that inspired us
Eager to become "bean counters"
Careful not to "spill the beans"
Putting beans into groups of 1's and 10's
Using a place value chart
Keeping a tally
Finding 10 groups of 10 to make 100
Bowls helped us keep track
Let the trading begin
ten 1's = one 10
ten 10's = one 100
ten 100's = one 1000
The numbers start to add up
Now we know: two bags of beans equals 5694!
That's a lot of guests to feed!
