Sunday, August 14, 2011

K-Mart Counting

We were in K-Mart and we came across cases of bottled water. My little boys decided to count water bottles by 6's and then by 4's. We could count way past twelve 6's!!

Then we figured out each case had 24 bottles...and each row on a pallet had 12 cases and each pallet had rows stacked 6 high...that was more math than they could do but they did understand that 12 x 24 was one row and 12 x 6 was the number of cases on a pallet...that they could do counting by 6's and then it took a little reasoning to figure out that 72 was the number of cases on a pallet and we would have to multiply by 24 to get bottles of water.  There are lots of ways to count that, we talked about 24 and 24 to get 48, and ten 24's to get 240 and then 240, 7 times plus the 48...but the 240 times 7 was more than they could handle in their heads.

For older kids you could figure out how many ounces and then how many gallons of water...and then how much each pallet weighed in water alone at 8 pounds per gallon...
Math is all around you and math time is anytime. It's fun to count.