We had a pretty big OMG moment a couple of days ago. During this weekend I was showing DS about numbers in different bases (base 2, base 16) because he's a patterns guy and similar to Kriston's DS. So I thought he'd like talking about why we have "digits" why we count in base 10, and how you could count with other symbols.

A couple of days later he went to his white board isle and titled it "1st grade binary" and started to write out 1 + 0 = 1, 1 + 1 = 10, 10 + 1 = 11, etc. I thought "oh he just memorized it" until he moved on to "2nd grade binary" and "3rd grade binary" with addition with carry over and subtraction with borrowing.

I am still shocked at that one.

JB

"There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those that understand binary and those that don't."

Wow! That's amazing! very cool.

(I'm one of the people in your quote... so i guess i'll have to see if DH can later teach this stuff to DS4, who is also patterny.)

My DS fell asleep on my lap last night at 7:30 while enthusiastically watching election returns. He woke me up this morning at 4:30 because he needed to know right now, how many electoral votes Obama had received. I said 338 to McCain's 155 (late night numbers) to which he promptly replied WOW- that's 68 more than he needed!

A funny one of logic a few nights ago, while going to sleep. We have annual passes to Disneyland this year and DS was very disappointed that Small World was closed in October when we were there. We told him they were fixing it because the boats keep sinking and we haven't talked about it since.

Just before bed a few nights ago he sits straight up and exclaims "I'VE GOT IT! The boats keep sinking because people are too fat!" It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck he was even talking about!

And yes... they are sinking because people are too fat, so they had to make the canals deeper.

JBDad--I love it! What a great little guy!

Do you know the books "How to Count like a Martian" by Glory St. John and "A History of Counting" by Denise Schmandt-Besserat? They're both kids' books about number systems, and have been much enjoyed here--maybe your son would like them, too.

Have a happy day!
minnie

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.