Home Math Academy

On Saturday mornings, K-Pop has established a routine consisting of:

1. Hearty breakfast, normally a combination of eggs, oatmeal with chocolate chips, fruit, yogurt and sometimes cereal (though any cereal in the diet invariably elicits protests from K-Mum when she appears later in the morning). 
2. One to two sheets of math
3. Two sheets of Chinese
4. Piano for K-bao (with ABCMouse, an educational app, for C-bao)
5. Free play

Both girls have made good progress with their math. C-bao has only recently started her worksheets and is currently on basic addition and subtraction up to 30. K-bao can now do double digit multiplication, basic division, and very simple algebra. Here are a few recent problem sets that K-bao tackled. 

STEM

K-Pop took K-bao this past week to her second STEM Night, an annual tradition at K-bao's school where the older grades create hands on projects that demonstrate scientific and engineering principles.

The K-folks love the school's emphasis on girls' STEM education.

Here is K-bao checking out some projects and getting explanations directly from the older girls. The projects below utilized some cool computer hookups to demonstrate conduction, among other principles.

This project showed static electricity and magnetic fields.

But clearly the favorite project of the evening was one where K-bao got to fill a bottle with water, pump it full of air and then watch it shoot off into the sky like a rocket.

The evening came to a dramatic and unexpected end a little later when the fire alarm went off and the entire community was ushered outside.

All in all a short but hopefully memorable experience for little K-bao that reinforced some of the practical and fun applications of scientific principles. 

Genius

K-bao: "C-bao, what's 1 + 1?"
C-bao: "10"
K-bao......"C-bao, what's 5 + 5?"
C-bao: "10"
K-bao: "Daddy! Did you hear that? Nobody taught her! She's so smart! Wow!"

Friends

Even in hypothetical math problems, K-bao insists on K-Pop getting the right friends worked into the situation, and protests vehemently if too many boys are included. She also inevitably rewards her closest friends (and herself!) with any hypothetical extra cupcakes.

This video is from several months ago but the instincts - which have been around as long as the K-folks remember - persist.

Three

K-bao made K-Pop super happy today.

K-bao: "How many stickers do I have? Three?"
K-Pop: "That's funny, K-bao. How many do you have?"
K-bao: "Six."
K-Pop: "So what if you took three stickers away? What would you have left? What's 6 - 3?"
K-bao: "Three. Because three plus three equals six."

Two beaming people. K-bao has been doing simple arithmetic for a while but she's never put addition and subtraction concepts together.