A numbers game

Guest entry from Sarah:

Leo has gone to London for a week, so I’ve hijacked the blog from him. I lack his humorous style, so bear with me. As a little background to the story that follows, a couple of nights ago I went to the kids’ school for “parent education night,” when the teachers teach us about how they teach our kids. It’s a Montessori school, and most of us aren’t too familiar with the methods, so these nights help us decode what we hear about their day at school. Math was the subject of the night. Jamie has been very into math lately, so I was quite interested.

So, our first activity this weekend was soccer. Jamie was a little sad afterwards because he hadn’t scored any goals, although he had played well. Jamie asked Connor how many goals he had scored in his little game, of which he had played all of five minutes, and Connor thought for a minute (clearly assessing how far he could push the exaggeration), and said, “ummm…. five hundred.”

Later, we were in the car between birthday parties, and Jamie started a game with Connor involving math. He would quiz Connor with questions like, “what comes after three?” On the easy ones, Connor was getting maybe 50%. But then Jamie made things a little tougher, and starting asking addition and subtraction questions, and it was all over for poor little Connor, who had no clue. Example:

Jamie: What’s 2 + 2?

Connor: Ummm, 100?

Yeah, good guess. It was pretty funny to listen to, and passed the time in the car. Connor is fascinated enough by numbers that he didn’t care how often he was wrong, which helped maintain the good moods.