Caroline's Math Brain

It's very interesting to see Caroline's thought processes unfold.  I've seen her do several things during our math lessons that I find quite interesting.

The most recent one happened this afternoon.  First, I should mention that we haven't memorized any addition facts... that starts next week.  I'm a little excited about the math facts because it finally feels like "real" school.  But I'm also nervous because I have no idea how that will go over.  Little did I know that Caroline has figured one of our first five facts out on her own.  She was doing a problem that had her draw five pennies in each of two squares.  Then she had to add them together.  As I was observing, she wrote the answer without any sign that she'd counted the picture, her fingers, or had time to count in her head.  I asked her about it and she said something to the effect, "Well, I have five fingers on each hand and I know I can count to ten on my hands."

Something else that I've noticed is that Caroline makes addition problems out of things that could be just simple counting.  Like, she'll break our manipulatives into two groups.  Then she'll count the groups on her respective hands to get the sum.

In a similar situation, she was counting something on a horizontal graph in a unique way.  It was eight squares wide and she knew that the first item on the graph was four triangles.  So when she got to the row that was full of eight circles, she counted the four triangles again and then added the four empty squares to figure out that there were eight circles.  It's like she's created her own form of early algebra!!