Emily, at nearly 5 years old, is showing that she has her father’s head for math. She can’t read yet, but she can do basic addition. Ask her what 3+5 is and using her fingers, she’ll tell you it’s 8. She also can figure out what 7+8 is and other problems that seem to require more fingers than she has. She gets lost with sums over 20, but she’s getting there. With Emily, it’s not just memorizing. She gets it. She understands that a group is a sum of its parts. She’ll see 7 items, and understand that whether it’s 4+3 or 5+2, it’s the same group. Laini sees each math problem as its own island, and rarely draws the connection. She memorizes what she needs to know when she needs to know it and no more, while she can expand on her reading to learn words that she doesn’t already know. I never taught Emily any of this. I had been working on reading with her. She just figured it out on her own one day, and apparently was listening when Laini and I were working on her math homework together (Laini is in 1st grade).
Anyway, last night we were in the car and I was telling Eric about how Emily was doing math and I called out a math problem to her in the back seat. She counted it out on her fingers and shouted out the answer. When I praised her for getting it right Emily said, “I’m good at fingering it out!”
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