Little People Math

Remember all those cute little wooden people I painted for Christmas? Well, they've come in handy recently!

We checked out a random book from the library which incorporated some basic multiplication into the story, dividing 12 children into several different groups in order to play different games. It got my brain whirring (whoa, that was an interesting sensation!), and I came up with an idea to do math with Melinda... with the little wooden people. She's shown a lot of interest in math, after all, and figured out enough to be able to do some addition, subtraction, and even basic multiplication, once I explained to her how it worked.

We had 10 that I painted, and managed to track down a few of the original solid-colored people that came with the car (Alex likes to carry them all over the house- their heads in his mouth!!- so they're never all in one place). In all, we grabbed 12 little wooden people, just like the story worked with.

We lined them all up in a row, and started making equal groups. First we did 6 groups of 2 (6x2), then 4 groups of 3 (4x3), then 3 groups of 4 (3x4), and 2 groups of 6 (2x6), finishing up with 12x1. Each time, of course, would equal 12 people. She got so excited by splitting every person into equal groups.

And then, gasp, I even did some very basic algebra with her, since my mind was so focused on equaling. Woah, am I crazy or what?! I did it like this:
Here Melinda, we have a group of 3 people here. This next spot is blank. And then on this side, we have a group of 6 people. How many people do we need to put in the blank spot to equal 6? 3 + how many equals 6?
She caught on pretty quickly, and generally wasn't making mistakes. It was kinda fun!

And then we veered away from real math, and just started playing sorting games with all those people, instead. Who knew I made them so versatile? I certainly didn't plan it this way. They split easily into groups of boys/girls, or groups by color similarities (blues with other shades of blue, purples with pinks, etc.), or groups by shade of hair color. And then lined them up like a rainbow. Neat.

It was such a good time, apparently, that she begged me all day today to repeat our math activity, making sure those people were gathered and ready to go when I was finally ready. We didn't play quite so long with the people this time around, because suddenly we were talking about numbers.

And I made a big chart of numbers. Oh, boy, did I! I wrote out every single number up through 230, in lines of 1-10, going down in colums. She had a lot of fun counting along with me, and noticing the different patterns the chart of numbers created (like the diagonal line with 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, and 99). I would have kept going... but I ran out of room on the page. ;) I can't remember the last time I wrote so many numbers at once. Dare I say it was sort of cathartic?? Not that I needed the emotional cleanse, oh no - after all, I got a full night's restful sleep, didn't you?

Oh wait, no... no, I didn't get a whole night's restful sleep. How could I be so silly? No, of course, last night was the night that Alex randomly decided to wake up at 11:30pm, and stay awake all the way until 2:30am. I sat, laid, walked, bounced, anything I could think of, and I did it silently, in the dark, for THREE HOURS. He wasn't upset at all, for the longest time, just awake and probably wanting to play. When he changed from maddeningly-just-on-the-edge-of-sleep (which he "entertained" me with for a full hour) to "I'm-tired-of-being-still,-time-to-play!" at 2am in the morning, I gave up with a giant huff. I was too tired to hold my eyes open anymore, and I was getting mad beyond reason. So I left the room, him screaming, and Jesse got to deal with the fallout. Alas, but the couch gave me no relief, either, since I could still hear the crying, and a dripping faucet, and a ticking clock.... And even when he was finally asleep and I got to go back to bed, I suddenly couldn't sleep, and laid there for another half hour. Oh, the joy of late nights, especially when you assumed you were out of that stage....

Anyway... that's all a giant tangent I didn't intend to make. But it just goes to emphasize just how nice it was to write all those numbers today. Mindless repetition, nice clean strokes of a pen on a big white page...

Ahh, good ol' math. How fun you can be when you aren't a 4-page calculus problem, or an unbalanced checkbook! Good times.