Originally Posted by rachibaby
My ds5 seems to be working out square roots for himself.

Yesterday morning he woke me up by telling me two not friends(uneven numbers) can become friends (even numbers) if you add them together. Then he went from that to working out multiplying two same numbers together(eg) two by two is four. Then straight away he wondered aloud what would happen if you did it "upside down" and worked out square roots. All in the sspace of about five or ten minutes.

This seems to me to be a bit further on from counting reliably to ten? I plan to approach the teacher with this, but ds is not co operative in testing situations. All this is coming from him independently on his terms. Any ideas what age he might be operating at?
Dunno, but let us know if you find out, because this is all awfully familiar. DS4 (will be 5 very soon) was playing with his calculator on a 40 minute bus journey the other day. On that one journey he seemed to be having insights into place value (arbitarily far: he had understood tens and units before, but he suddenly got the general case), multiplication (again, beyond the very small numbers), division, fractions, and decimals including recurring decimals, all for positive and negative numbers. It's scary, isn't it? One expects one insight to be enough to last them at least half an hour, but it isn't... And at school they seem to be on the level of recognising digits and putting them in order on a number line...


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