“Hey, mama,” Eliana asked, “is five plus three eight?”
I answered with an eloquent, “Yep.”
My almost-five-year-old daughter squealed in excitement, “I figured that out with no fingers!”
She then proceeded to rattle off the answers to a full page of addition questions.
My first thought was, “Wow, she must be a genius.” Then I remembered a certain melody stuck in my head for the past two weeks and thought, “I must be a genius.” Then I realized that if I were a genius my self-talk would be a lot more profound. So now that my ego is back down to it’s proper size I have a parenting tip which I now remember was accidentally discovered.
A couple of weeks ago Eliana asked me to play the “math song” for her before bed.
In this addition album by Kathy Troxel, simple addition problems with answers are sung twice– follow by a testing round (2+3 is ___, 2+3 is 5, 2+4 is ___, 2+4 is 6 etc.).
Thinking that seriously about addition after 8:00 p.m. had Eliana asleep in record time. So I kept playing it every night. Because I like sleep. And she must sleep before I can.
And it seems that she learned some math in the process.
The night after she rattled off the answers to math questions “without using fingers” for the first time she said she didn’t want to listen to the addition songs.
It’s a good thing there’s an album about grammer.
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