Learning put into the real world hours later.

For many reasons which we can share with you if you are interested, we are doing some math with Parker this summer. I printed out the California math standards for each grade, checked off what he already knows in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade and are working through the stuff he doesn't know or has never seen.  We do about 2 pages each day in this workbook or I make up problems.  He doesn't complain and seems to enjoy "learning" new things each day without having to do pages and pages of computations.  Long division bugs him.  Which makes sense since it doesn't make any sense.

Yesterdays discussion was like this:

Do you know what this is? (I drew a right angle.)

He said, "An angle.  A right angle."

Right.  Can you draw a 180 angle?  He drew a line.

Super. Can you draw a 360 angle?  He drew a circle.

Nice.  How about 45 degrees?  Got that right too.

Then we talked about different kinds of shapes like scalene, isosceles, and equilateral triangles.  Then I asked him to draw a rectangle, rombus, trapezoid, and square.  And because he is a little punk, he drew them all in each other.   Fourth grade geometry.  Check.

So today, we were doing money problems.  They focused around "what was a better buy". He didn't understand that statement at first and had some trouble (for about 2 minutes), but then got it. For each of the three problems he had to figure out if buying a specific size package of some food was a better buy than buying the items individually or in a smaller or bigger package.  For each problem, his brain worked differently than mine figuring out the answer, but he got them all right.

Then a couple hours later, we were at the market. We were looking at salads to bring to a BBQ today. We were deciding between a pasta salad and quinoa salad.  At first he said the pasta salad because he liked pasta better than rice, but then he said, "No, mom. Get the quinoa salad because it's a better buy." Which it was.