How Many Hands? A Math Lesson

Do you remember my post on Sunday about R being a whole hand?  When we were talking about her being a whole hand, she asked, "How many hands are you, Mom?".  Well, if that doesn't smell like an excuse for a fun math activity then I don't know what does.

I began by tracing R's hands onto paper and then making copies on colored card stock.  I cut out a bunch of hands.  I printed copies of twenty hands so that we can use the hands another day to work on counting by fives up to one hundred.

R and I sat together and figured out how many hands each member of our immediate family needs to display their age. 

We began with her age - one whole hand:

Then I asked her how many hands we needed for C - age six.  She looked a bit puzzled until I told her that some numbers may need less than a whole hand, and that she could use the individual fingers.

Next came T - age thirteen.  R knew exactly what to do this time.

When it came time to figure out how many hands for Mom and Dad, I tried to show her why it is easier to count by fives sometimes, but she still insisted on counting each and every finger to figure out my age in hands.

Once she had my age figured out though, I explained to her that she already knew how many fingers were there, so she just had to think about how many fingers had to be taken away to get to Dad's age.  She did this quickly.  

I will laminate all of the hands this week to make them durable so that we can work on counting by fives.

For the record, I am not two years older than my husband; he has not had his birthday yet this year.  He loves to say that I am two years older when our number ages suggest that we are though.