Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not familiar with those books, although previously DS has loved "big number" books. He favorite "math problem" that he creates usually involves googol

I'll check them out and maybe DS will be able to get them for xmas."

JB

Great resources Minnie - fyi, while i was searching for the martian book, I also found this book, which has teaching activities related to the Martian book (among other books):
Math Through Children's Literature

Thanks for the link, pauli! I saw some other old friends there--especially the Anno books and the Thomas Crowell Young Math series--and also some ones that are new to us--we'll check them out!

minnie

Those do sounds like good books to look into.

We had a fun tubby moment with dd2.5 the other day: We have foam letters in the tub for her and she picked up the 'F' and said, "Look, P for foot!" and stuck it on her foot. I laughed and said "That's an F and foot does start with F! And it looks a lot like a P", and we talked about how they look alike and different. I figured it was a coincidence that she grabbed the right letter...then later she had the 'Z' turned sideways in her hand and said 'nnn' for Nemo!
Ok, maybe less coincidence than I thought.

It's report card time...DD11 came home with all A's.

Rumor is that she's the only student in SLT (2ndary learning team, i.e., middle school) to do this this term.

It is great to have a place to talk about our kids. DD4 has been really into spelling lately. We play this game at home and in the car. We will give her a word and she will sound it out and tell us how it is spelled. She is getting really good at it. She is so cute if the word has an E on the end alot of times she will say and silent E when she get to the end. She likes to get words with trick letters which is what she calls words that are not spelled like they sound.

People use to tell me not to make her grow up so fast when she would do something unusual or really early. Now her uncles are being really supportive of following her intrests which is great.
Our family is not bugging me as much now that she is getting older and they know she is doing what she does on her own.

She also has been really into math. Doing addition and subtraction and a little multiplication. She likes to find 100 of things like 100 m&ms or rocks etc. This week we showed her how to count by 10s. And I tried to tell her how to count by 2s. We were amazed to see her because she will say 2 and then count on her fingers and say 4 etc she got up to about 12 and it was the first time we had talked about that.

She also is very interested in zero. She keeps saing to me things like, mom guess how many cookies I have for you, And then she will laugh and say zero. She does this about alot of things and thinks it is pretty funny. DS20m does not think it is as funny, he he.

Every day she amazes me. She always asks about different things. Like last week she wanted to know everything about eels. So we went on line and read about eels. As soon as I get info for her on one thing she says I already know about that I want to know about this other thing now. Its hard to keep up, but it is fun.

Well thanks for letting me go on and on a little. Usually only my husband hears this stuff. It is fun to read about other kid who are similar.

all this mathy talk reminded me of when DS9 was 4 he thoughtfully remarked (after incessently asking questions about numbers) "people change, but numbers never do!"

Not to go on and on about dd2.5 but she did this thing the other day that I was really amazed by - Nutcracker practice has started at my son's dance school and she was running down the hall and called out 'I hear the Nutcracker!' - I hadn't heard it yet, they had just turned on the music and only the first few notes had been played. I thought it was pretty cool, and I said something to a mother who had heard her also - just like 'Wow, that's cool'. She said 'Oh, that's normal if you grow up in a dance studio'.
Honestly dd is really enthralled by the Nutcracker and watched the dvd of last year's performance even in July - so I guess we have been hot-housing her with Tchaikovsky . I figured ok, I shouldn't have said anything (duh!).
Later that same day she was playing outside one of the studios (door closed so I am pretty sure she couldn't have seen what was going on) and said 'Oh, here comes the Rat!' - I looked into the practice studio window and they were playing the dvd to get the choreography down, and sure enough the Rat king had just come on the stage.
Anyway, I guess if the first thing wasn't that amazing at least the second thing was 'curious'. I am excited but I guess I mostly just need to share with you guys! Thanks for being here

our DD5 started gymnastics 3 weeks ago and was finding it a little easy, when she walked in they "noticed her" because of her body shape, the following week they said they had * her whatever that meant, I spoke with the coach last week about her complaining it was a little easy and I didnt want her to get bored and not want to attend anymore, he suggested we bring her to the class the following day and if the coach and her thought it was a better class for her then we could bring her on that day instead. We did as he suggested and she attended, had a great time and enjoyed it immensely. She was staying in that class! When we left I got talking to one of the mums, her daughter has been doing Gymnastics for 3 years and apparently unbeknown to us the class our DD is now attending is for children who have tried out and been selected out of hundreds of children for the program. She has no clue as to all this but we were a little proud of her, she is having fun and learning something new at the same time. It's always more accepted to brag about sporting achievements but to add that on top of already doing well academically well that just seems to be too much for some people, so glad we can share here.

Well, a few things interesting this week. DS4 the other day asked for 4/4 of a glass of milk. then he replied "that's a whole glass of milk" I agreed and was surprised he knew that as we had never done fractions. He then went on to say that 8/4 is 2 wholes, and 12/4 is 3 wholes and 16/4 is 4 wholes, then asked what is 16 + 4, because that will equal 5 wholes. Not sure where he gets this stuff.

Most of the amazing stuff he says and does is quite comical. that is always the stuff that stands out in my mind. Yesterday he wanted to play a syllable game and I wasn't sure if he really knew what syllables are. I asked him how many syllables were in a couple different words and he easily got them right. then he paused for a minute and said "mom, supercalafragelisticexpealadocious (sp?) has 13 syllables......no wait..it has 14"

He also loves word scrambles. He scrambled up the word alphabet the other day fairly easily for me to figure out. He is a great scrambler and sometimes has me stumped for a bit.

That's enough bragging for one day.