by A Farm Girl | Feb 12, 2020 | Farm Animals, Farm Life
Fivel is my big teddy bear and my dance partner. He is 16 hands 3 inches tall, which for non-horsey people means the top of his shoulder blade at the base of his mane (the hair along his neck) is 5 feet 7 inches off the ground. His is a gentle giant and a total prima dona.
Fivel is totally and completely my horse, although he loves DD too. I have had him since he was born (almost 17 years ago!). He was originally intended as a foal that we would raise, train, and sell. He had other plans. Every time someone would come to try him, he would pretend to be lame and act up. Before and after, he was always right as rain. Some horses are like that though, they find their person and that is that. No one else will do. He loves to dance with me, which means doing dressage to music. He is particularly fond of disco music. ABBA is his favorite. If a song comes on that he doesn’t like or likes he should be moving differently to, he refuses to do what I tell him. (This is why I call him a prima dona.)
by A Farm Girl | Feb 11, 2020 | Homeschool
DS & DD have both been stuck in the house with ear infections for almost a month. With cold damp air outside, they have not been coming out to do much of the farm chores with me. To help them still feel like they are part of things, I invented a fun game every afternoon when I come in from doing the afternoon farm chores. I started asking the kids a math problem to figure out how many eggs the chickens laid that day. They are competitive with one another so it is usually a race to see who can solve my Eggy Math problem first.
Both DS and DD can do simple addition so that is the type of problem that I give them. The chickens lay both brown and green eggs so my questions are usually something like “I collected 6 brown eggs and 8 green eggs. How many eggs did I collect?” Sometimes I will also ask something like “I have 1 dozen eggs in this carton. Remember that 1 dozen is 12 eggs. I have 4 more in my hand. How many eggs did I get today?”
As the kids’ math competence grows, I can expand this to subtraction. (DS can do basic subtraction in his head but DD still has a little trouble with it. I want to keep our Eggy Math game fair.) “I got 15 eggs yesterday and only 11 today. How many more did I get yesterday?” I can also expand it to fractions. “I collected 14 eggs today and 7 were green. What fraction of the eggs was green?” or “I collected 15 eggs today and we have 22 hens. What fraction of the chickens did not lay an egg today?”
I love math, and so do the kids. Eggy Math teaches them to solve word problems and mental math at the same time!
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