Educating Risa

Since we started our “Problem of the Day” approach, Daegan and I have been having many more math conversations. We’re doing fewer questions, but at far more depth. And, I am very happy to report, Daegan has been asking me more questions, of all kinds. Here are some recent questions we’ve tackled as “problems of the day”, all asked by Daegan:

1. How many days until my birthday? (which is in June). From that, he also asked “How many days until your birthday, Mom?” (which is in August), and I built that to “How many minutes until my birthday?”. Daegan then asked “How many seconds until your birthday?” It sure sounded like a lot of time when I discovered I had just under 9 million seconds left in my 30s! What was interesting to me here was how easily Daegan followed the multiplication I did to solve the problems, and how fascinated he was to generate these large numbers! We have not covered multiplication in our formal curriculum yet.

2. How many years is 1000 days? (We’ve been discussing seconds, minutes, weeks, months, years, etc. a lot lately). Ages ago he asked “How long is a generation?”, which led to an interesting discussion as there is only a loose mathematical rule of thumb, no hard and fast definition.

3. How many 3s are in 20? He asked me this yesterday, and we had the following conversation:

Me: Can you skip count by 3s?

D: Yes, but not up to 20.

Me: Ok, so let’s split that 20 into two 10s. (Demonstrating two "chunks of empty space, left and right" with my hands). Skip count this 10 (left-hand-side). How many 3s?

D: 3, 6, 9….so three 3s.

Me: Yes, three 3s and 1 left over. So how many 3s are in this other 10?

D: Three again.

Me: And one left over again. So we’ve got three and three…

D: 6 times!

Me: Yes, and 2 left over. This 1 and that 1 don’t make another 3 though.

D: (pause): Oh….so it’s 6 and 2/3.

I was pretty surprised to see that he has connected fractions and division like that, as I was all prepared to tell him we called it "6 remainder 2". Its so neat to see him making connections, and making sense of math in his own way.