Radical Unschooling
Ideas for Unschooling Parents
Me, in my head, "Yea!!!!!"
The background on this is that my son asked to "play the plussing game". That's what he calls our "Travel Math U See" set. We did that for a while then he went and got the "the other blocks" (starter set) and his (Primer student) book. We started where he left off last time (review after lesson 3) and he did 6-8 pages, to the middle of the lesson 4 review. He also jumped ahead, to somewhere around lesson 18. Since the review pages cover lots of topics, I don't know exactly where this one was from, but it was past lesson 4. The task was to count the things and write the number. Sometimes he just says the number, sometimes he counts while pointing.
This time he said, "What's 4 plus 3." (They were in 2 rows, 4 on top, 3 on bottom.)
"Why don't you count them?" I answered.
"I don't want to count, I want to think."
Then he rolled around on the floor a bit and asked, "What comes after 8 when counting backwards."
I answered his question this time, "seven," I said.
Then he said, "it's seven," and rolled back over to the book to write "7".
I think he did "4+4=8" in his head and used "3 comes after 4 counting backwards" to come up with his question, but maybe not. Anyway, I thought the whole interaction was VERY COOL. We had lots of fun with numbers yesterday.
Nancy
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