12 Days

The Zoomlians love "The Twelve days of Christmas"( partly due to this You Tube, no doubt). At lunch today, we discovered a really interesting number pattern in the song.

There was a heated discussion about whether the person gave every single item listed on a given day ("Today, I give you 3 French hens and another 2 turtledoves, and yet another partridge in a another pear tree." as opposed to "Today, I give you 3 French hens, and remember those turtle doves and so forth I've given you so far.")

I flatly stated that it was the first option. We designed a chart to show how many of each gift you would end up with. We wrote the numbers 1-12 down the page and placed an icon for each gift on the appropriate day. We kind of ended up with a tall column of pear trees, a shorter column of turtledoves, etc. Then we skip counted them (the older kids multiplied).

To see the number pattern we found, highlight the next space (or, even better, find out be doing it yourself!):
12, 22, 30, 36, 40, 42, 40, 36, 30, 22, 12

Once we saw the pattern, we could see why it had to be that way, but it had never occurred to me to even look! How cool is that?!