Papa Piccolo: Kittens in the Gondola Game

I had printed out some gondolas to go with our Papa Piccolo unit, but wasn't sure at first how to use them. I wanted to add some kittens to them, thought about putting numbers on the gondolas and having the girls place that many kittens on the respective gondola. I actually may still do that with Hannah, but I came up with a "game" for the girls.  They already know their numbers pretty well. So I thought some addition and subtraction practice would be fun.

This is how I set up the game. I found the gondola coloring page over at Crayola's website by googling "gondola coloring page."  The girls each colored five gondolas. Then I taped two sheets of light blue paper together to represent the water of the canals. 

I made number cards by cutting out 1.5 inch squares. I made two sets of numbers 0-5 and one set of 0-10. The kittens were also found by googling "kitten coloring page." Then I just made a sheet of them in my word processing program and printed them onto construction paper.

I had Amelia pick a number and place it on the Velcro, then she was to count out that many kittens for the first gondola.

Tabitha did the same for the second gondola.

Then they added them together.

Then we tried the subtraction.

Amelia chose to place four kittens in the first gondola.

Then I told Tabitha she could pick any number up to four. She chose four and then she was to take four kittens out of the first gondola and put them in the second.  That is the amount of kittens that left the first gondola.

Only problem was, Amelia didn't like Tabitha taking her kittens.

I told her it was just a game and she should come and pick the number to show how many kittens were left in her gondola.

She was so upset she did it so fast and disappeared.

So I told her we would do it again and I made sure Tabitha wouldn't take ALL of Amelia's kittens.

They are looking forward to playing again. Each girl will have her own game that will become a part of their notebooks, but I thought it was more fun to play together.

We are storing the pieces in envelopes on the back. All I have to do now is punch the holes to place it in the binder.

The girls have also been spending their workbook time working on math. Tabitha wants to go into space, so I told her she would have to be an astronaut. So she wanted to know what astronauts need to know. We talked about math and science. So now she thinks she is going to go to space soon as she is doing lots of math. Ooops.

She worked on most of these pages today.

This post is being linked up as a part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew Toys and Games for Homeschool Round Up.