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By amazing coincidence, she is also doing fractions in school!
Anyway, we've been working on adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators, and also on converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and the other way around. I've been encouraging her to remember that fractions are just a different way of writing division, because understanding that at her age made math so much easier in so many ways for me, but it wasn't explicitly taught to us until much later.
Yesterday it was very cold and windy, and so we stopped in the bakery to a. warm up and b. buy cookies. The nieces got turnovers. I got a quarter pound of cookies, which turned out to be five cookies.
Every time I can sneak math into the conversation, I go ahead and do it, so I turned to Ana as we waited for her sister and said "You haven't been taught this, and it may be a little hard, but I think you can figure this one out. I bought a quarter pound of cookies, and just to check, you know that there are four quarter pounds in one pound, right? A quarter pound is five cookies. What fraction of a pound is one cookie?"
She couldn't figure it out, so I told her I would rephrase it using the same problem, but a big pie instead. The big imaginary pie was cut into four slices, and I wanted to cut each slice into five smaller slices.
So she puzzled over this, and then came out, shining with happiness, "OH! I *get* it! You multiply! There are twenty slices!" And what fraction of a pound is each cookie? "One twentieth!"
You just live for those kinds of moments. Oddly, today she couldn't tell me how many tablespoons are in one cup if two are in an eighth of a cup (as her math problem in her school book asked, despite the fact that one hardly ever or even never measures by eighths of a cup), despite the fact that I know for certain I asked her the exact same problem two months ago and she answered it right off. But she wasn't feeling that well.
Anyway, we've been working on adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators, and also on converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and the other way around. I've been encouraging her to remember that fractions are just a different way of writing division, because understanding that at her age made math so much easier in so many ways for me, but it wasn't explicitly taught to us until much later.
Yesterday it was very cold and windy, and so we stopped in the bakery to a. warm up and b. buy cookies. The nieces got turnovers. I got a quarter pound of cookies, which turned out to be five cookies.
Every time I can sneak math into the conversation, I go ahead and do it, so I turned to Ana as we waited for her sister and said "You haven't been taught this, and it may be a little hard, but I think you can figure this one out. I bought a quarter pound of cookies, and just to check, you know that there are four quarter pounds in one pound, right? A quarter pound is five cookies. What fraction of a pound is one cookie?"
She couldn't figure it out, so I told her I would rephrase it using the same problem, but a big pie instead. The big imaginary pie was cut into four slices, and I wanted to cut each slice into five smaller slices.
So she puzzled over this, and then came out, shining with happiness, "OH! I *get* it! You multiply! There are twenty slices!" And what fraction of a pound is each cookie? "One twentieth!"
You just live for those kinds of moments. Oddly, today she couldn't tell me how many tablespoons are in one cup if two are in an eighth of a cup (as her math problem in her school book asked, despite the fact that one hardly ever or even never measures by eighths of a cup), despite the fact that I know for certain I asked her the exact same problem two months ago and she answered it right off. But she wasn't feeling that well.
