One kind of banana tree is getting sick. That is a problem for farmers.

Do you like bananas? Then it is a problem for you too. What can farmers do? Find a new kind of banana to grow!

READ MORE: Have you ever seen green stuff on cheese or bread? That is a fungus. It grows by eating other living things. Banana fungus won’t hurt people. But it is bad news for farmers. Almost all bananas in stores are the Cavendish type. Farmers might need to grow another type of banana in the future. Matthew 7:17 tells us, “So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” Our lives bear good fruit when we walk with Jesus.

Lesson #3: Banana Math. Draw a big circle onto a piece of poster paper and have enough yellow and red connecting cubes, Lego blocks, or other small manipulatives for each pair of students to have at least seven of each color. Tell the children that you had apple and banana slices for breakfast. But your spoon was only large enough to hold seven pieces of fruit. Some were apples. Some were bananas. Seven in all. How many of each fruit did you have? Write “seven in all” above the circle on the chart paper. Take suggestions from two students. Then let the children work in pairs to see how many combinations of apples and bananas totaling seven each team can find. How do they record their work? With pictures, numbers, the manipulatives, or mentally? How do they keep track of the total number of apples and bananas? How many combinations did each team find? Record several of their solutions on the chart. In the future, return to this problem using numbers larger than seven.