Math

Last night E&M started working with some littles on math. We got quite a bit of joy out of hearing the five year old grok questions like these: “So, if there are fifteen oranges in each bag, and you have zero bags, how many oranges do you have?”

And when the eight year old girl, R, who struggled with math last year, smugly asked, “What if there are seven oranges in each bag, and you don’t know how many bags there are?? How many oranges then?” … it was a glorious thing to see E graph the solution, and watch the eight-year-old’s eyes grow wide with wonder and understanding.

I’d like to see more of that. So in addition to rebooting pebbles, we are rebooting out old math games as well. The ensuing conversation in this morning’s meeting made me laugh:

Me: “I’d also like to play some math games with you, so math can become easy and fun for you.”

R: “Awee… do we have to do math every second?”

E: “No, not every second. Otherwise you’d be doing math sixty times per minute, and 3,600 times per hour…”

I lol’d.