Are any of you familiar with the book If you give a mouse a cookie?  Well, you may wonder what might happen if you give a kid a video game – in this case Minecraft. 

DJ has been playing a lot of Minecraft since we’ve been on summer break. Today while he was playing, he happened to have some (virtual) feathers and he wanted to make some arrows. So I reminded him that he also needed sticks (which he had to craft from wood planks) and some flint, for the arrowhead. 

DJ then gathered his (virtual) materials and crafted his (virtual) arrows. Once he had his arrows, he remembered that he had some real arrowheads and he wanted to find them. So he put down his game controls and went to his shelf that holds what I (loosely) consider his “science materials. 

So DJ explored his arrowheads for awhile. He got these from a mining activity at a local farm. He had been given a bag of mostly gravel & dirt and a sifting box with a mesh bottom to use in a stream of water. As the roughage flowed away, he was left with a handful of arrowheads. We talked about how the arrowhead was made and that Minecraft uses flint stones but his arrowheads were probably made of a different stone (that I embarrassingly was unable to name). It was about then that DJ noticed his Safari Life Cycle miniatures and Life Cycle cards on the shelf above the arrowheads. And of course, he wanted to play with them. 

DJ has 5 Life Cycle sets with 4-5 miniatures in each one and they were all mixed together in a single basket. That had seemed like a good idea back when we were studying life cycles because we both recognized them well enough to easily sort them out. But today, DJ started to hold up various items and I was having trouble identifying the larvae from the pupae and which of those went with with animal. Apparently, we both needed a review!  So we laid out the cards and DJ placed the miniatures on their corresponding cards as we identified them. Unfortunately, when we had them all placed, we discovered the Ladybug Pupae miniature is missing!  Oh no!  So we searched behind the shelves where items often fall when we’re not careful. We found a beaver, an eagle and a fish but no pupae!  We also found his work mat (which was rolled up in a tube) had fallen behind the shelf. And he decided he want to do work with it. He laid it on the floor and decided to compare it in size to the Golden Bead mat his grandma made for him. 

Seeing the Golden Bead mat, DJ decided he wanted to do math – specifically subtraction using the Golden Bead set. So we brought down the tray and DJ selected a random number of beads to be his starting number that I would steal from. 

DJ’s “randomly selected” quantity turned out to be 2,999. In this picture he is laying large number cards in front of each stack. I then closed my eyes and randomly stole an unknown amount from each category and placed them in the center row of the mat. DJ counted my loot and discovered I had taken 1,453 so we placed small number cards showing that number. Then DJ moved the beads left in the top row to the bottom (answer) row and counted out how many he had left – 1,546 – and then we found the corresponding small number cards. At that point DJ wanted to try the same problem with the stamp game. 

Using the number cards to remind us, DJ laid out enough stamps of each category to represent 2,999. He then counted out the proper number of stamps from each category to be 1,453 and slid those stamps off the board. That left only his solution on the board which you can see in the photo he is counting to confirm that it is the same 1,546. It was about then that DJ noticed the calculator that we have stored in the stamp game box and he wanted to use it to check his numbers. 

DJ used the calculator to type in “2,999 – 1,453 =” and read the answer from the digital screen. 1,546 again!  Amazing!

So if you give you kid a great game to play during summer break you just might find yourself doing math. 

Happy July everyone!