Peanuts

Homeschooling has provided us with quite a few interesting days this fall. Laura has entertained us with quite a few fascinating science experiments. But, this week the spotlight was on Daniel and his math. For some reason, I guess to keep the first graders engaged in their math, Saxon math uses a lot of manipulatives and real world food to keep them interacting with numbers.

This week it was peanuts.  This was fun because recently Daniel was asking me about peanuts.  He had seen a big barrel of unshelled peanuts at the grocery store and wondered what they tasted like and how to eat them. Then I read his lesson for the week and noticed we needed peanuts. How bizarre. As Nathan was out, I called him and asked him to bring us home a large bag of unshelled peanuts. He too, thought this was a strange request, but has learned that in homeschooling I often ask for strange things.

He did a good job and brought home a big bag of peanuts:

The first day our lesson consisted of using the peanuts to count by tens. We sorted the peanuts into 10 cups with 10 peanuts per cup.  Then we counted by 10’s to 100.  Then we cracked open each nut and put the two nuts on a sheet of paper that had 10 peanuts drawn on it and drew the two peanuts. If Daniel found a peanut with 1 or 3 nuts, he got to eat those.  Then we counted by 2’s to 10:

The next day’s lesson was about following a recipe. We were going to make peanut butter! We had to shell and measure one cup of peanuts. This took awhile.

Then we mixed the peanuts with oil in the blender and made peanut butter:

We then learned about halves and fourths and spread our peanut butter on fourths of bread and shared with everyone at home.  It was a little salty, but tasted very peanutty! We decided maybe next time, to use unsalted peanuts and a little sugar. All in all a nutty adventure for sure!