Again, with the Math stuff.

Ya'll, Leah is doing math. I mean REAL math, not just counting to 100 (or 122, where she got bored and stopped yesterday in the van).

I was going to start this post with a cute little, "Don't mean to brag but..." and then Aaron informed me that I brag about my kids all the time. And not just on this blog. So I figured I'd get right to it, then.

I pulled out a couple workbooks the other night and gave Leah the choice of letters or numbers. She chose numbers, which already proves she has some of Aaron's genes. Also, I thought the odds were stacked towards letters because of the princess on the front of that book, and the "boy" cartoon stuff on the front of the numbers. Not that they were trying to do any gender-influencing or anything.

This workbook started with adding - easy stuff like adding groups of pictures. Then it went to just the numbers. Leah would say, "Three plus two..." and kind of look off in the distance a bit, and then yell, "FIVE!". I swear I don't know how she did it, but this is a clear sign (cross your fingers) that she will do better in math than I have - because I was sure she was going to have to use her fingers. She did eventually, but not until the sum was more than 6 or so.

I even tried to teach her a couple of tricks, like subtracting half of a number leaves the same number as that subtracted (4-2=2) and that 9+6 is just one less than 10+6. Some worked better than others, but a couple actually helped.

Subtraction was next. I was even doubtful if she'd make it through the first set of problems - but she did! Fingers really helped with subtracting. But then she made it up to the sums of 10-18...she did bit here, but after too many times of asking me what 8 + 8 was, she decided it was too hard and stopped. Fine with me. At her age, I'm pretty sure I would have given up on the second page and gone to read books.