I love Nina!
One of the things I love about Nina is her unconventional way of looking at things (unconventional compared to my boring ways). Well, it shouldn't come as any surprise that she approaches algebra with a little different flair than I do.
Today, for her story problem, instead of writing x's and y's for her terms she decided to draw pictures of tomatoes and cabbages (I assume the problem had to do with tomatoes and cabbages). Anyway, I thought it was very cute.
The hilarious part was when I was checking her problem though. Here is the conversation that occurred.
Nina: "I don't think I got the answer right."
Me: "No. The answer is right, you did fine."
Nina: "Really! But you can't even tell that that's a cabbage, and the tomato doesn't look much like a tomato...."
Ha! I found her response quite humorous :-)
One thing I can tell you, she has struggled to solve story problems for weeks now, never quit sure how to compose the equations from the word problem.....until she started drawing pictures for the variables. Now she almost always gets them right!
I love this. Anna is my artist. She also struggles with math. We have found color to be her tool. It was very useful in long division. We switched color each time we moved over a decimal place. Now she is combining like terms (algebra is just on the horizon). Once she recopies the problem she circles the like terms in differ colors. For example, all the constants are circled in blue, the "x" variables in red, the "x squared" in orange, and the "y" variables in green. If nothing else, it's pretty!
ReplyDeletePretty math! I like it!
DeleteHistoric Dugan homeschool moment: When I was in 3rd grade, as I was learning multiplication, my mom went through a multiplication story problem with me. The story had something to do with muffins. My mom got to the end of the multiplication problem and asked me "OK, so what is the product?" to which I replied "Muffins!" Duh!
ReplyDeleteLove it!! Maybe you should teach Nina math. I don't know how much math she'd learn, but you two would have a great time together :-)
Delete