Leprechaun & Fairy Math

Everyone knows where leprechauns get all their gold, right? Everyone but me, that is.   I guess I never really thought about it until I read That’s What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting and Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato: an Irish Folk Tale by Tomie DePaola while researching for our big Operation Catch a Leprechaun (CAL). According to Irish legend, leprechauns are shoemakers to the fairies.  Fairies pay them in gold.  Leprechauns hide their gold in large pots, sometimes at the ends of rainbows.  This was the dreamy inspiration for our leprechaun and fairy math lesson.

My little fairies and I loved this so much that we set up our own little leprechaun shoemaker and shoe-loving fairy scenario and turned it into a lovely lesson in math.

There once lived two beautiful fairies who loved shoes.  They had lots and lots of shoes;  big shoes, little shoes, pink shoes, blue shoes, boots, dress shoes, casual shoes, sparkly shoes, dirty shoes, old shoes, ….. They had so many shoes, yet they wanted more! Always more! More! More!  More!

The leprechauns made beautiful new shoes;  glittery shoes, fancy shoes, fairy shoes….

Mother fairy, who was lovely, kind, smart and beautiful, had had enough! “No more shoes!  No more scuffed boots!  No more broken shoes!  No NEW shoes! Take them to the leprechauns for repair!” said the mother.  The two fairies, wanting to obey their mother, skipped off to the nearest leprechaun shoemaker’s house.  When they arrived, there was a sign on the door that read, 

There was also a sign that read:  

The two fairies looked at each other and shrugged their wings.  They sorted their shoes into pairs and left them, along with a bag of gold coins, at the leprechaun’s door.  

1.  If the biggest fairy had 11 pairs of shoes, how many gold coins should she leave?  

2.  If the littlest fairy had 6 pairs of shoes, how many gold coins should she leave?  

3.  How much would 2 new pairs of shoes cost, one pair for each fairy? 

4. Which would be cheaper; to buy 2 new pairs of shoes or to get their shoes repaired & cleaned? 

Being the sweet big sister that she is, Miss 4 jumped right on answering the question of how many coins the littlest fairy should leave to get her 6 pairs of shoes cleaned and repaired.  The concept of counting by twos is far too advance for her but she did come up with the idea of placing a gold coin in each of the shoes and then counting  all of them.  I think that was a brilliant strategy!  Of course, I am not biased at all 😉.  I was thrilled when she correctly came up with the answer of 12 gold coins.  She was proud of herself and continued on to figuring out the answer to how many coins the biggest fairy would need to leave.  

After she arrived at the answer, we then discussed counting by twos and how it was a faster way to count things.  She nodded her head in understanding and we practiced it for a bit.  However, she was convinced her method was the best!  

We couldn’t leave Miss 17 month out of all the gold coin fun! Although, she did have quite a time touching, throwing and trying on all of the shoes!  We set her up with a simple fine motor activity of pushing our awesome Dollar Tree coins through a yogurt container.  Our container will eventually be used to build one of our leprechaun traps.