Nearly March!

My latest chalkboard drawing: Spring Is On The Way

I realize it is a little early   to be thinking about spring, but the gloomy-ish days (and countless hours spent outside shoveling away snow off the driveway) have somewhat 

worn out their welcome, in my book!

We have had a visitor from Australia for the past two weeks (a friend of my husband), which has meant that our schedule and rhythm has taken a bit of a hit. Instead of fighting the disruptions to our rhythm, I have been embracing the fun activities that have been occurring in its place. We still manage to keep our morning and nightly rhythm pretty much the same, but from about 11am until 2pm or 3pm, it's been less rhythmic than usual. 

Our guest will be here for another week, and then we'll get back into our usual rhythm. By that time, we'll be well-and-truly ready for March and for the coming of spring. One craft project I'm planning to do with the kids is the one where you cut a green pepper in half (horizontally) and then dip the sliced edge into green paint to create shamrocks on a piece of paper (as explained here). We have a lot of Irish blood in our family, so we always love to celebrate St. Patrick's Day every March.

I'm going to have my son create a couple of separate art pages with the shamrock shapes (using both the 3 node and 4 node green peppers) so that when it dries, we can work on some various math problems. I should be able to incorporate all four processes into the deal, and here's how:

1. have my son add together the shamrocks

2. have my son subtract shamrocks from one another

3. have my son number each node on the shamrocks and then skip count by 3's (for the 3 node peppers) and 4's (for the 4 node peppers)

4. Using the total for all of the nodes on a page, we'll divide the peppers by number of nodes. For example, once we've determined the number of nodes of all of the 4 node peppers (as determined in number 3 above), we'll use that number and then divide by the number of peppers to notice that our answer is the number of nodes per pepper. We can use the same process for the 3 node peppers, or divide by the nodes to get the number of peppers if we choose.

Happy Weekend!