Tooth Fairy take-away.

I promised you a Tooth Fairy...and here she is!  We did a 2 week dental unit and I needed a break from what we've been doing.  Plus I had these adorable tooth-fairy printables in my file {from Mailbox Magazine, I believe} and I was tired of looking at them year after year.  As I typically do, I needed a way to extend the "worksheet" into something different and I think I came up with a great idea!  :)

After discussing how many teeth the kids have, we used sponges to paint the teeth currently in their mouths.  I cut incisors, canines and molars but you have to look closely on some to tell the difference.  If students were missing teeth, they left spaces where their big teeth hadn't grown in yet.

Then we turned their teeth loss into a math problem!  We're learning to add and take away in math so I thought this would be a great integration lesson.  The kids wrote 20 {for baby teeth} subtracted the number of teeth they lost and came up with a total of teeth in their mouths on that day.  We wrote the subtraction problem on a tooth {vertically like 2nd graders!!} then attached the tooth to a piece of yarn which hung from the Tooth Fairy's pocket.  THEN we enticed the Tooth Fairy's visit by turning that math into informative writing.  Science, math and writing in one activity??  Yes please!