I wanted to share with you what we gave my children's school friends this year. My 7yr old is in second grade and they had a class party this week and each child was asked to bring in little stocking treats for each person. I made these little matchbook notepads (you can find a quick explanation on how to make them by clicking here) and Christmassified them a little stamp on the front cover. I fortunately found some boxes of small colored pencils and tied one to each of the notebooks (I had been resisting the temptation to run over to IKEA and nick some of their little yellow pencils as they would have also been perfect but I am not dishonest enough to take 30. FYI, I later found out that you can BUY those little yellow pencils - they are called golf pencils).
For my daughter's pre-k class, the kids and I put together these little bags of 'snowballs'. At least, I thought the marshmallows looked like snowballs - the 5yr old apparently did not, but that didn't stop her eating them. These bags were actually great to make up because my kids got completely involved. We set up a little assembly line, had a quality control guy checking the numbers, a label maker...the kids loved it. My 7yr old was in charge of working out the different amounts of marshmallows, bags and labels we needed. At one point he even said to me 'Wow! This is like maths but with instead of numbers it's marshmallows!' I explained to him that this is exactly why they teach you maths in school, so that you can apply what you know to everyday situations when you need it. He totally got it and was so excited to be sorting piles of tens and units.
I never really felt like that about maths because it was always a subject I struggled with in school. Now that I do more sewing I use maths much more and I can literally feel the cogs of my brain slowly kick into life and start to turn with a reluctant rusty squeal. Just the other day I needed to work out the diameter of a circle from the circumference and it took me ages. In fact, I had to look it up in the end. Probably you already know, but you need that little Pi guy, so no wonder I couldn't work it out in my own head, and despite knowing Pi off by heart I had no idea you needed it to work out the diameter of a circle. It's probably good for all sorts of things I don't know about.
As my husband pointed out to me later that day that's the difference between learning by rote and really understanding something. And if the Christmas snowball bag making extravaganza is anything to go by, my son is obviously way ahead of me already. But I knew that already.
No comments
Post a Comment