Adventures in Homeschooling

The thing about homeschooling is that just about everything can be a learning experience.  For example, I found three placemats recently that had pictures of the solar system, the United States, and the world.  Since these three things happen to be what the boys are currently interested in (Thank you "Cars 2" for this new interest in international travel), it was a no-brainer to buy them.  Now our dinner conversations are interjected with questions about state capitals and where specific countries are.  Sometimes as an extra treat, William will break out in the Continents song I taught.  We even have a duet version that we will perform for a small fee.  Namely, a lot of applause afterwards.

As I have written about before, I am slowly introducing addition to Dominic.  During an actual lesson, we use manipulatives to do the math, but obviously the end goal is to be able to compute these in his head so that he can work with larger numbers.  Therefore, when an opportunity presents itself, I try to present the situation as a math problem.  And as a numbers nerd, it is rare I can't find some way to make a situation into a math problem.

 Last week, Dom and Will asked for chocolate tortillas.  This is simply nutella spread on tortillas and wrapped up.  A delicacy that the boys do not get as often as they would like, so when they do it is memorable.  As I was making them I asked "If each of you wants two, how many do I have to make?".  All of their brain cells were draining slowly to their stomachs, so the answers they provided were all incorrect.  As I finished making the 4th one, I showed them that the 2 on Will's plate and the 2 on Dom's plate added up to 4.  At the time they were unimpressed with my impromptu math lesson.

However, today as I came in to the kitchen to make my lunch, I overhear Will saying "2 plus 2 is 2".  I glance over and I incredulously ask "2 plus 2 is what?"  Dom looks up and says 4.  Now, I know he does not have many math facts memorized.  In fact, I would guess he only has 2 + 3 = 5 memorized.  So I asked him how he knew that, to which he replied "Because of the tortillas!".  Obviously, William will need to repeat the lesson, though knowing Will, that might have been his plan all along...