Ana was doing her school homework with me on Tuesday.

[conuly]

Simple, basic "add up the numbers and divide to get the average" stuff. (And let me just say that I cannot stand word problems that are just there to say they have a word problem. "Susie has 5427 books. What number is in the tens place?" For crying out loud, that's not a word problem! There's no need for a framing sentence, because nobody cares!)

But I digress. She did one problem that was 6, 14, and 10. After working it out she turned to me and said, excited and amazed, that you can take the 4 from 14 to make 10, and add it on to the 6 to make 10, and it will still work!!!

She was so enthusiastic about this idea that she spent a good five minutes breaking it down to me.

Evangeline is still doing double digit subtraction. Fun! In her extra math book she's working with money, which is slightly more fun, especially as her sister is doing decimals and she gets to be "just the same".

Comments

[ncp.livejournal.com]

So my brother's downfall began when he explained, at the tender age of five, why 6 + 6 is the same as 5 +7. "You take one away from the seven to make six, and add that one to the five to make another six. And since six plus six is twelve, it's the same thing!". Then he spent the next eighteen years being forced into all sorts of academic accomplishments. After he got his PhD from Harvard, he spent five years as an underemployed hipster/"writer".