(a picture Mail took by the Cloud Gate last week)

I suppose I ought to record this for posterity, or at least as an indicator to the world that kids can stumble upon math concepts and enjoy exploring them. This is the sort of connection I wish I had been able to make when I was struggling to learn my multiplication tables and being flash carded to death in a good-hearted but tortuous attempt to help me.

I made egg sandwiches for breakfast and the kids noticed this old multiplication toy that my neighbor lent us sitting on the table. It was from his childhood and basically you slide a little window over to see what 8 times 8 is. It is set up like a the actual multiplication table from 0 to 10.   First Anoif asked to be quizzed by Mail on the 5 times tables. She amazed him with her rapid replies and he wondered if she was cheating somehow. I thought she would explain to him how you simply have to count by 5’s to figure it out, but instead she explained how you just take the number you are multiplying 5 by and cut it in half than add a zero or remove a decimal point. Wha?  It works. 5X7, half of 7 is 3.5, remove decimal and you have 35. 5X8? Half of 8 is 4, add a zero and you have 40. Cool. He liked it and tried it out for awhile.

Then they moved on to ones, zeros and tens times tables, obviously no problem. 11’s were dispensed with once the concept was grasped. At some point Mail shared his theory on doing the 12 times tables, which I missed but he has shared it with me before and it made sense. All in all I’d say they spent 15 minutes gloriously laughing their way through the tables and I stayed very busy 10 feet away so as not to infect them with some remnants of my irrational fears of yesteryear around memorizing for tests. Whew.

Later that same day…Anoif and her friend went off for a few hours to a local eatery to interview people about their love of eating there, how often they eat there, what they eat, how far they travel to have lunch there, etc…something that will most likley lead to either using a spreadsheet or a graph of some sort to show statistics. No one asked them to do this, they just dreamt it up last time we were there eating lunch. Ken asked me today, “So, why are they doing this? To write an article or use some program or something?” “Uh, I think they were just curious about the huge lines of people there and thought up a way to find out about them.” He laughed, “So, they were curious about something and they followed up on their curiosity? People hardly ever do that if it involves any planning.”