Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Spring

It’s been a long hard cold winter. Did I tell you I hate winter? I hate the snow. I hate the ice. I really hate the cold. This morning I looked out the window and I saw a bird fly by. A bird, that’s encouraging. Then I saw a tiny green bud on the end of a branch on the bush in front of my window. Then a second and a third. There really are signs of warm weather coming.

We’ve been cooped up inside for so long now. Finally we can go outside without ten layers of clothes on. No more hats and scarves and gloves. Just a jacket and we are good to go.

I think one of the best things about spring is that we will no longer have piles of wet clothes in the bathroom. My son will go outside for ten minutes and then come in because it is too cold. But that ten minutes is enough to get him soaking wet. So off come all the layers of clothes and he pulls on dry ones. Then an hour later he decides to go back outside. But of course he is back in the house ten minutes later. Again he is soaking wet and needs another complete change of clothes. He doesn’t own 25 pairs of pants so I now have to do extra loads of laundry. Every towel bar and the shower bar have wet clothes hanging to dry. With the warmer weather, there will still be wet clothes in the bathroom because he will insist that it is not raining when it really is. But at least it won’t be so many layers. And it won’t be every day.

I’m really glad it’s spring. I’m glad the temperatures are getting warmer. I think we’ll go outside and play.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Multiplication

I have an eight year old son in third grade. We have recently started working on multiplication. After about ten minutes of working on multiplication my son announced to me, “This is stupid. I will never ever have any use for this. I am not going to learn it ever.”

First I tried to explain how much multiplication will make his life easier. I talked to him about how he can figure out how much it will cost to buy five packs of rocket motors instead of buying just one. (Rockets are his most favorite thing ever.) But he said he could just add them up. No matter how I tried to explain things, he just wasn’t buying it. Multiplication is just stupid. I decided to let it settle for a few days.

We were riding in the car the other day and I said, “Let’s play a game.” How much is 1 times 0? He thought for a minute and said “One.” I told him 1 times 0 is 0. I explained, “If you have nothing and you have one of it, you still have nothing. No matter how many times you have nothing, you still have nothing. So then I asked him, “How much is 2 times 0?” He thought for a minute and then said, “O”. I praised him for having the right answer. Then I started asking him, “How much is 10 times 0?” “How much is 27 times 0?” “How much is 359 times 0?” “How much is 9,387 times 0?” He kept saying 0 every time. He finally understood that 0 times anything is 0. So we moved on to 1 times 1. Then 1 times 89. 1 times 8,362. Every time he gave the right answer. I think he may be starting to understand this multiplication thing.

During our actual School time, I have skipped multiplication. But we practice it in the car. When he has a little better grasp of it, we will go back to it during School time. So far he understands 0 times, 1 times, 2 times, 5 times, and 11 times.