1001 Things to Spot in the Sea

I brought out one of my favorite types of books to share at math time. While it isn't *really* a math book, it can be used as one - and children really love it. 1001 Things to Spot in the Sea, by Katie Daynes, presents a colorful array of water-related scenes - like a big "I-Spy" book. 

Each page is a different scene, and I will read one page each day until we have made it all the way to 1001. 

Not only is this book fun for children to look at together to find all the creatures, but it also provides the context for helping students use place value ideas to add with regrouping. We will use interlocking cubes and base ten blocks to figure out how many things they spot in each scene and then in the entire book. We will focus on different strategies for combining the numbers to make it easier to count.

For instance, today we started with the first page labeled Open Sea. I pointed to the humpback whale, took one cube and told the children it represented one humpback whale. I placed this cube on the chalk tray. Then each child in turn came up to count each creature - 10 sea nettles, 8 half moon fish, and so on. As they found them in the book, they could make stacks of cubes to represent their number. We soon had a train of cube stacks that looked like this:

Then we counted the numbers in the book. We came up with 63 by adding the numbers one by one. How could we check easily to see if we were correct? Students immediately came to the conclusion that we should regroup into tens and ones. At first, we had one too many cubes (I think one sneaky moon fish was the culprit), but after trying again and rechecking our work, we came up with six stacks of ten and three ones.

As we go through this book, children will get plenty of practice with hands-on materials to represent numbers, using addition strategies including regrouping, and making reasonable estimates. It will be a celebration day when we reach 1001!