Cruisin' Right Along

Ayden Jane is doing great these days. This evening I am sitting on the sofa, listening to Ayden Jane do such a typical grade school kid thing. I know it seems like a little thing, but as she carefully chooses which Valentine should go to each of her friends... As she carefully writes their names on the card... As she proudly tapes a glow stick to each one. (because candy is bad for you and she thinks it would be silly to give them something bad for them) It is all as sweet and wonderful and 'normal' as when my other kids performed this ritual.

Earlier, she was helping Gary in the yard. We have had lots of branches fall and sticks all over the yard. He told her he'd give her a nickel for every stick she picked up. She went to town and picked up 111 sticks!! Well, something like that - she was counting for herself. Anyway, afterwards we decided to take our evening walk (mile and a half every night) before she started her Valentines. During the walk she was talking about what she was going to do with her 111 nickels.

I asked her how much money 111 nickels is. She was a bit stumped at first but we worked through it. I asked her if she could figure out how many nickels one dollar was. She said she didn't know, but that each nickel was 5 cents. Then she started counting by 5's to 100 and asked if 20 nickels made a dollar. I told her yes! Great job. Then asked her if she could now figure out how many dollars she had if 20 nickels is 1 dollar. She skip counted by 20's (slowly, but on her own) and jumped up and down when she realized it was 5 dollars! When we got back she informed Gary that he had to give her 5 dollars and 11 nickels. I'll take it. I was really impressed actually. Money can be a tough one!

In school she is working on fractions. She hasn't had any trouble really with the concept and totally understands things divided into halves, thirds, and fourths. She did struggle a while with partitioning shapes into these quantities. It was the actual drawing the lines and making a shape divided into fourths at least reasonable proportion wise. I honestly thought it was beyond her... due to visual spatial things. She bombed it at first but sure enough, as she did her review sheet tonight she nailed it.  Love that kid.

Also, they were making grids with rows and columns - basically discussing area. She totally got that it is like multiplication (which doesn't actually come until 3rd grade) and preferred to set up a multiplication problem and solve than count boxes. Love it.

As always, when she is tested she will score lower than her understanding because she just makes simple mistakes and loses focus sometimes but wow does she have the math concepts!