Splitting The Herd Summary

783 Words2 Pages

For our lesson we used the book Splitting the Herd by Trudy Harris and illustrated by Russell Julian to pair with the topic of odd and even number patterns. This book focuses on odd and even numbers through the story of Miss Emma’s cattle constantly getting loose and escaping to Cowboy Kirby's property. All the cattle were getting mixed up because they all looked the same it was hard to identify whos was whos. Cowboy Kirby then recommended splitting the twenty cows in total on his property into two groups, this way each would get ten and it seemed fair to both farmers. Initially it worked as a good solution, however, the following morning two more cows escaped back over the fence and the two farmer were met with the same problem. Now Cowboy …show more content…

The same issue continues to occur and Cowboy Kirby’s solution remained to just split all the cows in half and give Miss Emma her half. Cowboy Kirby does not notice that his herd keeps getting smaller while Miss Emma’s grows larger. Emma doesn’t want to hurt her friends feelings by explaining his math mistake.Throughout the book, Cowboy Kirby and Miss Emma fall in love and in the end of the story they solve their problem of splitting the herd by marrying each other and combing their herds into one big farm family. This book would be used as an extension to our lesson on odd and even numbers by supplementing it with illustrated examples and delivering the material through a meaningful story. Our lesson went over exactly what odd and even numbers were and how to identify them. The main example provided in the text suggested calling students up three students to the front of the class. The students were asked if each child could be paired up with a partner, obviously the answer was no because one student would be considered the “odd man out.” The teacher then called up a fourth student and asked the same question, this time they could

Open Document