A+Project+Approach

​One is a Snail

Overview If one is a snail and two is a person. . . we must be counting by feet! Follow the sign to the beach for some mathematical mayhem. Whether you have one foot or ten, sit back on your beach blanket and enjoy counting big feet and small – on people and spiders, dogs and insects, snails and crabs – from one to one hundred!

April and Jeff Sayre’s delightful children’s book //One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab // offers an opportunity for students to develop their number sense and problem solving skills. After reading the book, students search for different ways of representing numbers as animal feet. Students make drawings showing their solutions and try to come up with as many different solutions as possible. This activity allows students to be creative and to learn to think more flexibly about numbers.

Using the text Read some of the story. This document has a variety of teaching and learning activities that can be used after reading // One is a snail, ten is a crab //.

This document was created using a project-based approach to learning.

The article // Legs and more legs // describes how the author’s, David J Whitin and Phyllis Whitin, used the //One is a snail, ten is a crab// to initiate a problem solving investigation.