Amongst all the excitement of swimming and Bush School Camp at Nowanup, Class 2 have been busy helping Ciaran the Woodcutter keep track of his firewood pile.  We discovered that if we stacked the numbers up in straight columns like Ciaran’s wood pile, we could easily keep track of how many loose sticks, bundles and bags he had in his shed at any one time.  Ciaran always bundles up wood in lots of ten and puts them in the 10’s part of the shed with the other bundles.  This involves a bit of ‘carrying’ as you can imagine.  When he needs to sell more than he has available in the ‘loose sticks’ part of the shed he ‘borrows’ a bundle from next door and unties it in the ‘ones’ part of the shed.  Quite a lot of heavy lifting for growing mathematical minds!  

We have explored many tales to do with the wisdom of woodcutters, we’ve moulded wax figurines and sung woodcutter songs as we have worked.