Kids Homework

Hello all,

This evening was an adventure in homework for me. Monday night is when the kids get their week's worth of homework from their teachers. It is due on Friday, so tonight we start it and work on it a little every night to have it completed in four days. Zac's homework was centered around telling time and finding dates on the calendar for November. It was a lot of fun having him find the third Thursdays of the month and circling it. We then compared socks and arranged them in biggest to smallest. I had the biggest foot. Ali had the smallest foot. We finished with some simple math questions.

I then turned my attention to Ali's homework. I checked her worksheets on language arts. She successfully matched the "sh", "th", "ck" and "ch" sounds from her spelling list to each of the word sound lists. We then started in on her math worksheet. Things were going good until we reached the final questions:

How many 25's does it take to make 100? Without counting again, surmise how many 25's it will take to make 300? This puzzled Ali. She had the first answer as 4. But without counting again, she did not know how to figure it out.

Enter Dad.

On a sheet of paper I wrote the following

4 x 25 = 100
4 x 25 = 100
4 x 25 = 100

I showed her that if she added up the 4's, it would answer the question.

I then showed her how to do it with variable substitution: Y x 25 = 300. Y = 300/25, Y = 12.

I let her know that Grandpa Scott would be very proud of his granddaughter right now.

That was the final exercise of the night. The kids were free to go have fun. I just sat at the kitchen table for a bit and thought about how bright my two kids are and how much fun I'm going to have watching them grow.

Good night,

-Andy