Fractions on the Farm

Summer brings calving season, which makes a lot more work for the boys and I.  It is my favorite time.  I remember when I was growing up my mom and I getting  ready to go do chores and we would walk over to the barn to fee all of the calves, so it is a bit of a tradition when I'm doing this with my boys.

We feed our calves fresh milk, we do not use milk replacer.  When it comes time to for feeding we need to wait until Scott has milked a cow with the bucket milker.  After receiving the milk in a pail we then have to divide it among smaller pails, or bottles. HHMMMM.....fractions!!! So, I casually ask Evan how we will know each calf is getting the same amount.  He said,"well just fill it up to the same spot, mom." So I questioned a bit more, "So, say 1/3 of the bucket?"  Then there was the look, "huh"?  So I began to talk with him about how if there are 3 1/3rds  that makes a whole.  We got a little deeper into fractions by trying to figure out how we could divide the whole bucket into four smaller buckets, and he got it.  He said, "Well wouldn't that be 1/4?"  YES!!!!  Then I had to do my pitch about how math is everywhere in your daily life.

It hurts when people say, "Oh, your husband is a farmer....." What people do not realize is how incredibly smart farmers are!  There is so much math on a farm.  From the size of tools to being able to figure out if tonight's milking is going to fit in the bulk tank.  Education is around my boys all of the time and I wouldn't trade it for the world!

To have your children practice fractions click here.  This is a great site for all ages.

More figuring on the farm!

Scott and I drove down to Mayer, MN yesterday to bring 17 of our steers to another farm.  So, today we had to ween some other calves off of milk.  We had to take 7 steers/heifers from the machine shed and put them in pen 1, then take 4 out of huts, and 4 out of the pen in the barn to put in the machine shed pen.  WHEW! It is a lot faster to type that then to actually do it.  When you want them to move, they don't!

So, the question arose from the boys, how big is pen 1 and 2?  HMM....  Well, I just so happen to know how to figure that out!  We need to find the area, and to do that we need to multiply the length by the width.  It amazes me how much math we do in our daily lives.

Well, to get on with our math problem of the day,  we needed to figure out the area of each pen.  To figure that out we needed to measure.  This layout that I found is pretty close to ours.
 

Instead of taking out the tape measure we just multiplied 2 by 12, we have two twelve foot gates, and 3 by 12 for the other direction.  To find the area of pen 1 we need to multiply 24 x 36, which equals 864 square feet.  We did the same thing for pen 2.  Pen 2 is bigger. 7 gates long by 4 gates wide.  I asked Evan what we had to do first.  "multiply by 12!" 
Right on man!!  So now for pen 2 we have 7x12 and 4x12.  We take 84x48 to get 4032 square feet.  To find the total of both pens we just need to add the two totals together and we 4896.  So!  That is how we figure out how big our pens are.
I did some math standards research and it looks like at about grade four MN students start to learn about area of shapes.  Evan will be going into grade four, so hopefully this summer will be a good prep for him!

Here is a great catchy video that could be used in the classroom, I think students would get a kick out of it!

What the Hay!!!

Well, this time of year brings, well.....a lot of hay!  We round bale and we also square bale.  I usually do the square baling and my husband does the round baling.  There was once talk of him teaching me how to round bale, but I was once told by a very wise elderly woman not to learn how to do everything, or I will be doing everything!!  So, I turned on my selective hearing at that time!  The boys and my husband and a lot of neighborhood kids get the pleasure of unloading the square bales into the hay barn.  Oh the joys of summer!  As the days go on, we need to haul the round bales off of the field.  As the boys and I drive around the field as Scott loads the trailer, I told the boys, "Just think how long this would take us if these were all square bales and we had to pick them up by hand??"  Then I thought, "Teaching moment!!!"
 
So, now we need to figure out how many square bales are in a round bale, Oh boy!!  The boys wanted to do some estimation on the weights of the bales. Evan guessed 600 lbs for the round bales and 20 lbs for the square bales.  Brooks guessed 200 lbs for the rounds and 50 lbs for the squares.  I had no idea!!  So, Scott clued us in.  The round bales vary between 800 lbs-850 lbs and the squares between 40lbs-45 lbs.

Now, for the math part.  To find out how many square bales would be equal to one round bale, we had to do a little figuring.  We decided to go with the weights 40 and 800.  To figure this equation out we took 800 and divided by 40, which gave us 20.  The answer to the question is there are approximately 20 square bales to each round bale.  Now, to take it one step further, there were 269 round bales on the field, how many square bales would that be??  This was a chance where lattice multiplication could came in.  We took 269 multiplied it by 20 and came up with 5380!!  That also made us appreciate our round baler!!!