Simply Mother

(This is a continuation of the previous entry.)

It is evening now and we’re making cookies. I made the dough a few nights ago, thinking I could bake them for the people who came to help us move in, but it turns out I couldn’t even get to the kitchen stuff, so Matt just brought home donuts for them. The dough is still lacking the chocolate chips though, so the girls are each bent over a cookie sheet, making balls and pressing hundreds of chips into them.

While they bake, Sarah finds the beans from earlier and starts doing some calculations. She counts 2 piles of 7 and comes up with 14, and I ask her how much she thinks 2 piles of 6 would be.

13, she guesses.

Why?

“Because six is just below seven and threeteen (she still calls it that sometimes) is right below fourteen.”

Very reasonable guess. I ask if she wants to check, and how she can find out. She immediately takes two away — one from each pile — and then counts them again. (Although she does start at the second pile, saying “seven,” instead of counting the six again. This is a newer development, to realize she doesn’t need to count the first pile if she already knows how many there are there. She doesn’t do it quite consistently yet though.)

When she gets to eleven and only sees one more, she hesitates, then skips twelve and just says thirteen for the last one, commenting that she must have missed one.

This is so fun, I think! I love watching how she thinks.

Eventually she does count them over and is at first disbelieving that there really are only 12, so we sit and try to think of why it would be. Suddenly she brightens! “I know! Because we had to take away two beans to make piles of six instead of seven!”

Funny how she took them away automatically, without even thinking about it — she just knew that’s what she had to do — but then it took a bit of thinking to realize the difference it would make, and fully understand why her initial impulse was correct.

We do several more calculations, testing out 3 sixes, 3 sevens, and all the different ways of making 6. (You know, 2 piles of 3, 3 piles of 2, 1 pile of 6, 6 piles of 1.) She is fascinated the whole time, and pretty much running the show, except where I occasionally question her about why something would be that way, or move some beans around in a different pattern or something.

Meanwhile, little Jade is taking the whole process in, and inviting me (read: persistently repeating gentle — and not-so-gentle — requests any time I get too wrapped up in something non-Jade-related) to repeat each step on her level (she directs), with her own fistful of beans. (I think she is determined not to be the squished-between-and-often-ignored middle child. And I’m so happy about that.)

I never, EVER thought I would enjoy homeschooling my children. And I still know I wouldn’t if it meant I had to do “school at home.” No way — not if I had to be the teacher/scheduler/enforcer, prodding and pushing and nagging my kids to do this or learn that. Pouring over lesson plans and curriculum, trying to figure out the best way to make my kid memorize some formula or understand a concept that has no meaning to him? This is what I imagined homeschooling to be like, and oh, no thank you, I am NOT cut out for that sort of thing.

But this? Watching my children delight in their own discoveries? I can totally dig this.

Filed in: family • home education | December 3, 2008