Hawkeye Math Activity

Hawkeye Math Activity

   

When I was first planning what to teach “Spiderman Jr.” for home school I sought some advice from a friend of mine.  She had lots of great advice for me which continues to help me as I teach him.

One of the things she shared with me was her template for planning her lessons (here is the link I hope https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8_71tjoHnsNSjlhQ195dVFTZEU/edit?usp=sharing). She picks a theme every week and every day and these themes revolve around her kids interests.  So when I planned out the year I had “Spiderman Jr.” look through some of Every Star is Different Blog for things he liked and a whole bunch of other places. 

Eventually he understood that he could pick anything he wanted to learn about and I would teach around/about that subject and he got even more excited.  One of the things he wanted to study was super heroes. This was particularly hard to create because while there is a lot out there most of the other home school lessons cost money. So I had to come up with a lot of it on my own.   

One of the super heroes I wanted to use as a teaching tool was Hawkeye from the Avengers.  However, I couldn’t find anything out there for him, not even if I bought the lesson which was lame.  So I took some ideas for other things I had seen people do that were not super hero related and I combined, cut out parts or changed parts to make it work for the theme.

Step#1

I took the examples I had seen on-line for DIY Popsicle bows and made one for him. I will note however, that most people said they could bend their stick after an hour. It took me a day of soaking before I could bend mine.

Sep#2

I prepared the q-tips like I have seen others make to go with the Popsicle bows. Here is what I changed. I cut off one end of the q-tip and split the end a little. This is done for real arrows and I think it is easier to shoot with these on the end of an arrow.

Here is where my additions come in, maybe someone else has done this but I didn’t find it on-line.

Step#3

 I and drew red target circles on the old printer paper with red marker.

Step#4

I wrote numbers within each circle for him to aim at with his q-tips.

Step#5

I put a little bit of paint on a piece of plastic for him to dip his q-tips into.

Step#6

I let him dip and aim his q-tip arrows.  He had a lot of fun doing this. He would tell me which number he had hit and it was easy for me to verify that he had because of the paint. 

I could also easily verify that he could recognize the numbers we had been working on. 

It was also great for working on his fine motor skills because of the exact pinching he had to do to hold the q-tip on the string to shoot it.

In the future if he picks super heroes again as a theme I look forward to adding new elements to this activity.  Like when he starts adding, I can have him add up the numbers he has hit.  I could also use this for multiplication even further down the road.  However, it’s too soon to tell if he will still be into super heroes when we get to that in math. Regardless it was fun for him and me.

Materials                     Cost

Popsicle stick- left over          0.00

Dental floss-already had          0.00

Duct tape –left over              0.00

Old printer paper- given to us     0.00

Red marker –already had         0.00

q-tips-                          1.00

Paint-already had             0.00

Total Cost

                                 1.00