paddy plus

How nice to gather two or three.

Someone has left them here for me.

So round, so soft, so good to see,

I'll add them up, so happily.

-from "The Four Friends", an Enki Education 1st Grade Math story

It's school vacation here, which means the local children's museum is open to the public, and we can't hold our Homeschool Classes today. Which means we were free to pursue our own curriculum instead. So it seemed like a good day to "formally" start working on addition. Hence, we recited Paddy Plus's verse from "The Four Friends" story, and did a led-drawing of Paddy, gathering up Minnie's packages one by one. (This first drawing is J's.)


Zoo Boy's drawing. He was super excited when I posted Paddy's verses -- he read through them aloud, then brightly announced to J, "We're going to talk about Paddy Plus today!" He immediately asked me if we were going to play the same "games" -- the word problems for them to work out with the stones from their counting bags -- and I assured them that yes, we would do some of those. He was whooping and hollering in anticipation.

So we did -- I told them some short story problems, like "Paddy went out one sunny morning and discovered some gifts, and began collecting them. First he picked up 2 from under some bushes. Then he found 3 behind a tree. He found one more at the entrance to a burrow. He sat down with the gifts he gathered to have a picnic -- how many did he have?" What I find the most interesting is that J is now waiting to let Zoo Boy figure out the answers -- obviously J knows, but he sits by with a knowing smile on his face waiting for Zoo Boy to come up with it on his own. I had been worrying about the fact that J tends to shout out answer without giving Zoo Boy a chance (although The Boy always figured it on his own anyway, just to make sure J was right), but I never said anything to J about giving his brother a chance, as I wasn't sure how I wanted to broach the topic to avoid curbing his own enthusiasm. Yet, he seems to have worked that out all on his own. In fact, he seems to get almost as much pleasure at watching his brother come up with the answer as he does presenting it on his own. It's an amazing thing for me to behold. He's going to be just incredible with his own kids some day.

Of course, if you read my previous posts on the topic, I'd only be kidding myself if I thought for a moment I was presenting new information to them. Because stuff like this -- a piece of scrap paper I found amongst J's origami projects yesterday -- is going on on a daily basis around here.











Here's a magnadoodle example of the same sort of thing, from this morning. And the answers are not always written in J's handwriting. Zoo Boy is definitely "in" on it too.












My Paddy Plus drawing.