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Tall Tales Team 1

      Paul Bunyan was born in Maine, USA to two normal sized parents. He was born with a full black beard. By the time he was two weeks old, he weighed 100 pounds! Soon he had to leave his town to live on his own. He just didn’t fit anywhere but the woods!

     One day when he was grown, there was a big snowstorm. He heard something crying and left his cave to investigate. In a large snowdrift, he found a baby ox, frozen blue like the snow. He took the baby back to his cave and warmed it up. From that day on, he and Babe the Big Blue Ox were inseparable.

     Babe grew almost as fast as Paul! One of Paul’s favorite things to do was to close his eyes and count to ten, then seeing how much Babe had grown in the meantime. Sometimes he had grown up to a foot! Together they invented logging: cutting down trees and getting them ready to use in houses, fences and boats. He became the most famous lumberjack in the USA.

  1. Paul Bunyan was about 230 pounds at 1 month old. By the time he was 9 months old, he weighed 575 pounds. How many months did it take him to grow that much?

  2. Paul Bunyan ate 10 sacks of potatoes as part of his breakfast everyday. One day, he was extra hungry and ate 7 more sacks of potatoes. How many bags of potatoes did he eat total? 

  3. If Paul Bunyan grew 15 pounds every week, how many pounds would be gain in 7 weeks?

  4. Babe the Blue Ox was giant. The distance from his feet to his shoulders was 29 handles. The distance from his shoulders to the top of his horns was 13 ax handles. How many ax handles tall was Babe in total?

  5. Babe the Ox ate 3 bales of hay per day. If Paul had 9 bales of hay, how many days would that last Babe?

  6. Babe the Ox weighs 942 pounds. In one week, he gained 38 pounds. How many pounds does he weigh now?

  7. Paul Bunyan cut down 8 trees with a swing of his ax. If he swings his axe 5 times, how many trees will he cut down?

  8. One of the requirements to be a part of Paul Bunyan’s Logging camp was to be able to pop off six buttons from your shirt in one breath. If one man popped off 5 buttons and another popped off 6, how many buttons did they pop off altogether?

  9. In one Paul Bunyan tale, his camp was overrun with 10 foot long “bee-squitos”, a combination of bees and mosquitos who had stingers in their front and back. If the back stinger was 3 feet long, how long was the rest of the bee-squito?

  10. 39 Bee-squitos made it into the camp’s Mess Hall (where everyone ate). If 17 of them got caught in a giant trap, how many were still flying free?

  11. In order to send their logs down the river, Paul Bunyan and Babe had to straighten it. If the river weighed 1859 pounds and the rope Paul tied to Babe weighed 9 pounds, how many pounds did Babe pull in total?

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