Tigers at Twilight

This week our new Magic Treehouse book took us to India, and because of that, I decided that our Little Passports would take us there as well.  So, we got a double dose of the country, and we are just getting started.  There is so much about the country of India that we could do things with and learn about, but I'm going to have to limit it as we are drawing our school year to a close, and we still have South Africa to venture to as well.

To begin with, I'll cover what we did in math this week:

Hayden worked on mentally adding tens.

Sawyer and I played "Go to the Dump" to work on numbers adding up to 10.

Sawyer making numbers with the abacus and matching them up to place value cards.

Creating abacus paper beads to match place value numbers he assembled.

Hayden and I played Memory with skip counting cards.  He had to find each number in
the correct order.

Hayden using a Chinese checker board to find ways of counting without actually
"counting" individual dots.

Sawyer making 100 with tiles to match the abacus.

And then making 200 with the tiles.

Using abacus tiles to extend the hundreds.

Learning to visualize 100s.

And now for Magic Treehouse and the country of India.....

After reading Tigers at Twilight, we looked for India on the big wall map.

Then we opened our package from Little Passports.

Sawyer loved the baby stuffed tiger that they sent us.  (Now you see why I decided
to do the country of India with our Magic Treehouse book!)

We got our boarding pass to go online and play some games.

Hayden put the flag sticker in our passport.

Then we added the map pin sticker to the Little Passports map.

I wrote a series of events from the book on paper strips, and the boys had to
put them in the correct order that they occurred in the story.

Sawyer had to write and illustrate ONE thing that he learned about tigers.

Hayden researched a little more on tigers and found three interesting things about tigers
that he could use in a persuasive "essay" from the tiger's point of view.

That big graphic organizer to his left was what he used to help section out his thoughts.
We didn't use the whole thing because it gets a little advanced, and I didn't want to scare
him away from writing.  

This was his final product.  Messy, but hey.  Don't kill tigers.  :)
"Don't kill tigers because we are endangered.  I am important to the ecosystem.  I am India's national animal.
I do not eat people by nature.  Tigers like me should be saved from hunters.  If I'm not protected, my species
will disappear in 20 years."

Then, of course, we put the map of India in our notebooks, and we colored in the country
of India on the map of Asia.

The boys colored the flag of India, and added it to their notebooks as well.

Then, I printed out a dot-to-dot of an elephant.  Sawyer's was numbered 1-35.

For Hayden, I whited out the numbers and rewrote them as multiples of 3.