It’s a funny thing that I remember learning formulas at school. I don’t remember them now and I’d get flustered if I had to do a complicated sum and show my working out because I doubt I’d remember the right formula but at some point after I left school and began to live in the real world, numbers (or money to be more specific) suddenly started to make perfect sense. So now I could do that sum in my head and maybe with a little help from my fingers and I’d know exactly what the numbers depicted. For my children I wanted to bypass the complicated bit and get right onto the logical bit so most of our maths is talking and demonstrating. Sometimes we use money, sometimes edible items (these work best), sometimes Geomags, anything that we can add to, subtract from, share out, or change in some way. This means that Ms R (and possible Master R too) would be ‘behind’ in this subject if they were at school. Ms R might know what an equals sign looks like but she wouldn’t know many others and 12 / 3= would be to her what chinese is to me. She very quickly told me what ninety-nine plus eleven was today but has no idea what I’m talking about if I say "Imagine they are in columns, you’ve added the units up now carry the one over and add it to your tens". She can count in twos, threes, fives and tens and today we talked about counting in elevens. She got the pattern straight away and suddenly had an idea of what it would look like written down. Interestingly but rather logically I suppose, her imaginary written numbers started at the bottom as she said "You’d have a one and a one and on top of that you’d have a two and a two and on top of that…" I suppose it was years of looking at times tables trying to memorising them that had me briefly horrified that her numbers went up and not down. Master R said he wanted to learn to count up in tens so we did a bit of doing that. Often the most educational part of our day is the journey to some place promising educational opportunities.
Other recent gems:
Finding lots of sticky notes that read ‘OOT Of ORDRE - SORRY’ stuck on chairs and other places.
Ms R making a tiny book at our home ed group and starting to write a story in it about Master R and his cat Buzz.
Rainbows beginning again and me being able to drop her off and pick her up (as I wasn’t working). She’s still hoping there’ll be a sleepover soon and I’m hoping there won’t.
Master R piping up "If you cut an eight in half you get two threes!" when I was randomly giving Ms R numbers for her to halve. After a bit more of what seemed like daydreaming he said "And if you cut it the other way you get two zeros!". This very predictably led to talk of symmetry and asymmetry and which other numbers you could cut in half.
Ms R having one of her paintings displayed in an art exhibition. Unfortunately I didn’t realise it was a weekend only thing so we missed seeing it.