In the gourd story children are working on number sense by composing numbers and figuring out ways to represent the different compositions. Children also become familiar with more, less, equal, odd, and even. People want to buy some number of gourds. Sometimes they want to know all the different ways green and yellow can be combined to give them the number of gourds they want. Sometimes they all want the combinations when there is more (or less, or the same) of one color than the other. Sometimes what someone wants is impossible (e.g. I want 9 gourds with the same number of green and yellow.) Children are engaged in figuring. out how they know they have found all the combinations. At the story’s end, a new color gourd is in the mix and now combinations are made up of three numbers.
The Gourds Story: Number Sense
