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January 29, 2009

Number sense

Ethan's teachers, at our conference with them, offered the opinion that he has true "number sense," meaning, I guess, that he gets numbers. I believe it's true - today in the car he wanted to guess how many English homework packets there have been - one for each week of school. He knows there have been 83 days of school, and that there are 5 school days in each week (at first we started down the path of 7 days, but we soon saw the error of our ways). Noting that 5 doesn't go evenly into 83, he decided to just do 80/5. He almost immediately said, "OK, so that's 16." I always love to hear HOW he gets answers, just as much as knowing that he got an answer. He said, as if it were obvious, "Because... 5 is half of 10, and then 8 + 8 is 16!" I didn't immediately see the whole process, so he explained more: "80 divided by 10 would be 8, and since 5+5 is 10...." So he divided by 10 to get the easy answer, then multiplied that answer by 2 to get the FINAL answer. And he was right.

Posted by ktingey at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)