School-Age: Math

Math...eh? Sounds like not a whole lot of fun but we made it fun this week!

1. Reading:
We read the book "A Hungry Lion or a Dwindling Assortment of Animals" by Lucy Ruth Cummins. This book is hilarious as animals keep coming in and out of the story at different parts. We played a game while I read the book. I printed the characters and had my teen helpers cut them out and stick them to Popsicle sticks. Then we had a variant of a reader's theater. The kids worked in groups and had to listen along to the story and keep track of which animals were leaving and which were returning on each page.

Our Characters: 

2. Activity:

After the book, we collected our characters and had the kids stay in groups. We handed out BINGO cards that I had made. They were math related so each of the squares had random clipart. Some were vegetables/fruit, some were animals, and some were random pictures. Each picture was a certain number of what was in the picture. Two bananas, seven cats, four rabbits, etc. 

An example of one of our scorecards:

The number BINGO ended up being a very popular and fun game! The kids loved it and asked for more rounds! But we had to move on to our finale -- the craft.

3. Craft

I wanted a simple craft since I knew we would spend a majority of our program having fun playing BINGO. Since our book was about a hungry lion, we made lions out of paper plates. It's a simple craft since all you need are paper plates, markers, and scissors. I had the kids color the outside edge of the paper plate for the lion's mane. Then they cut strips along the edges for the lion's hair in the mane. They could add a face to their lion in the middle of the plate. (Some were better than mine!) 

Overall, it was a fun program! After our Tuesday program, we learned it was easier to have the kids lay out their characters in order for the 'reader's theater'/subtracting part before we began reading the book. Otherwise, they enjoyed listening along and sharing which characters went missing each page -- it worked on listening skills and reading/listening comprehension. That was the subtracting part of our program. The BINGO was all about adding different amounts of items together (counting the amount of birds/bananas/etc.). And our craft tied into the hungry lion book. 

Most importantly, we had fun all while learning a little math at the same time!