Moo-ve over, class fish and hamsters. Merrimack Valley Middle School math teacher Becky King has adopted a cow.

Bonnie, a Brown Swiss dairy cow, does not literally live in King’s sixth-grade classroom, but her presence is very much felt. The 10-week-old calf’s height chart is posted visibly in one corner of the room, and on many Fridays, King’s students participate in “cow math,” when they answer pertinent questions about the lives of Bonnie and other bovines like her.

On a recent Cow Math day, King’s fifth-period students practiced estimation, conversion between decimals, percentages, and fractions, and applying ratios, to answer questions about Bonnie’s diet and her financial value to the farm.

“You’re not going to get rich being a dairy farmer,” King observed.

For King’s four classes, Cow Math is predictably a hit.

“It’s more fun than regular math because it’s less math, and that’s more fun math,” said Lucas Doolin of Loudon, echoing a common sentiment.

But King said that isn’t entirely true. Rather, the real-world applications of classroom units distract students from the fact that they are indeed doing real math.

“It’s not math for the sake of math,” King said. “It’s math for a purpose.” 

King stumbled upon the Adopt-A-Cow program through Facebook over the summer and knew immediately that she wanted to incorporate it into her classes. The free program, run by the Dairy Excellence Foundation, pairs classrooms with farms and provides a series of lessons in math, science or reading. The program has options for students from kindergarten through eighth grade.

Bonnie resides on Brisson’s Daona Farm in Shoreham, Vermont, and though the students won’t get to meet her face-to-face, the farm provides them with a steady stream of photos, as well as height and weight measurements.

The program also sends King worksheets which she then adapts to fit her curriculum and the three different levels of math she teaches.

King began class on Friday by asking students to estimate how much Bonnie had grown since birth, when she was 90 pounds and 31 inches.

The sixth graders’ guesses for Bonnie’s current height ranged from 50 to 70 inches. 

“Cows grow a lot, but she’s not growing that fast,” King told them, revealing that she had only grown to 34 inches. (King would update the corner height chart at the end of the day, after all classes had had the opportunity to guess.)

King said she often fields questions like, “Why do we learn this? What purpose does this serve?”

“If I can connect math to this cow, then it just makes math more fun to them,” she said.

Merrimack Valley is also a relatively rural school district.

“A lot of these kids live near or on farms,” King said. “So it’s stuff that they see, or they drive by all these farms on their way to school, so it’s not anything out of the ordinary for them.”

After estimating Bonnie’s height and weight, students worked in small groups to fill out worksheets on cow-related accounting and nutrition.

The latter informed students about cows’ typical diet – 70% hay, 20% silage, and 10% almond hulls – and then asked students to convert those percentages into decimals and fractions.

“It’s a fun way to learn math,” said Serenity Charest, of Loudon. “Usually we’re learning about colored water, and it’s not as fun.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.