Math and laughter
One thing I really like about the Singapore Math books is that they are introducing 2 stage problems that really promote thinking and not just mindless activity. For example-
 A mailman delivered 1050 letters on Monday. He delivered 206 fewer letters on Tuesday than on Monday. How many letters did he deliver on both days?
The student has to subtract to get Tuesday’s total before he can add to get the total for both days. So even though this is a review for Moriah, Samuel, and Toby, it really keeps them on their toes to think through the problem carefully. Moriah is ready to start on Section 2 in her 3A book on Monday. Samuel and Toby are a couple of exercises behind that.
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This morning I gave Peter several math pages to work on. Three were on identifying shapes, which he can do quite easily on his own. Elsie was glad to ‘help’ him though before starting on her own math, and the two of them sat and giggled their way through the worksheets. From what I gather, they added to the directions by not just circling the requested shape, but also keeping track of how many were found by making hash marks at the top of the paper. For some reason incomprehensible to me, this was very amusing. And then when they went on to the “Counting up to 18″ worksheet- oh, my! Math is just too funny for words.
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