This activity pairs with our warm up: The Strange Flowers

Provide students with paper and pencil and show them the image of the blue dayflower and yellow tiger flower (above). It can be helpful for younger students to also provide a basic sketch.

Ask students to draw 3 or 4 dayflowers on their paper followed by 3 to 4 tiger flowers. When complete generate ideas of other ways we can count. Alice was counting how many full flowers there are, is there something different we can count as well? Help students as needed to see we could instead count the petals.

Count by 1's, adding a number to each petal. The first dayflower should contain 1 and 2, then second 3 and 4, and so on while the tiger flowers should contain 1, 2, and 3, followed by 4, 5, and 6.

Conclude by showing or discussing why the flowers counted in such a strange way. While Alice was counting how many whole flowers there were, the flowers counted by their petals. This meant the dayflowers counted 2, 4, 6, ... and the tiger flowers counted 3, 6, 9, .... Provide students with crayons or colored pencils and invite them to create their own flowers with strange counting. Tell students they are not limited to 2 or 3 petals, they can pick any they want, but make sure each flower has the same number of petals.

A sample worksheet and student response is provided below. If students need support in determining how their flowers would count, encourage them to write numbers in each petal counting by 1's. The largest number in each flower will be the number the flower says.