On the way to get Brady from school today, an amazing - and very rare - event occurred... Parker fell asleep. Sound asleep! And even more surprising for the child who these days infrequently naps, he didn't fidget when I transferred him to his bed - that oh-so-snuggly bed which had been changed into fresh sheets by Miss Theresa only three hours prior.
And having learned from a recent bedding dry-cleaning urgency in Florida (apologies again Grandma!), I did have the forethought to put down a thick triple layer of towels under his bottom. And we needed them, btw.
So on downstairs for a one-on-one lunch with Brady. While looking through his backpack I pulled out a flyer for Mathnasium, a math tutoring and learning center (recently opened by a Smyrna mom who I know from school and church.) Brady took great interest in it. I told him it was a place kids could go to help them better learn their math skills, and he asked, "Like three plus three equals six?"
"Exactly," I told him. He paused, thought for a minute and then with a mouth full of quesadilla declared, "I want to know adding."
Well, we have a quiet and uninterrupted teaching moment. So I seized it! I sent him upstairs to grab his good-ol' Melissa & Doug Abacus, and we sat together for a half hour looking at how you can add beads, subtract beads and even multiply rows of beads.
After much oral discussion and quizzing I gave him some written "test" questions and walked away to see if he could figure them out all on his own. While 6+3 was weirdly 10 the first time he figured it, he got all the remaining questions correct! He even excitedly discovered that you can make "7" in different ways, showing me 3+4 and 5+2 on different rows of the abacus.
In the end, his face had a HUGE smile and he exclaimed, "Oh. My. Gosh! I Totally Get Math!"
And watching that "Ah-Ha!" moment appear on his face, I was tickled to infinity.
1 comment:
I love that little man! He's a keeper.
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