A fun Saturday

Today was a fun day. Southern California is having a heat wave and we ate lunch outside, and cooked burgers on the grill for dinner. We ate inside - we are also a desert, in spite of what you see in terms of terraforming. So it cools off a lot in the evening after sundown.

We took the boys to a large park in Huntington Beach, where there is also a large dog park. Aunt Evie and Foxy were at the dog park. We did take the boys in for a few minutes, but decided that this wasn't a good idea. Basically, in the dog park, dogs are off-leash but kids should be on-leash (totally controlled by a parent/guardian); in the play park, the dogs must be on-leash and the kids off-leash. Neither scenario allows play between the two species.

So Aunt Evie came over later in the day and joined us for BBQ. Foxy even partook - Mikey asked for two hot dogs and only ate one (they are "all beef").

Mikey and Dinosaurs

If you saw Part I of the Disney post, you saw that Mikey was smitten with the dinosaur diorama. He brought all his plastic dinosaurs over, and set them up - staged them - to recreate the scenes as they appeared there. He even added a few scenes of his own! They were spread across the yard, with huge separations between (18" to a couple of feet). Don't think I mentioned in the Disney blog, but Mikey knows the names of the dinosaurs, even the ones that Aunt Evie and I did not know.

David and Math

David is having issues with math. Some things that play into this: He's not interested. He doesn't see the use or value. Some of it is fairly abstract. He tries to hurry through it instead of thinking through it.

One of the things we are working on involves subtracting one area from another. Example: A person has a rectangular pool with a length of 10' and a width of 6' and wants to build a 1' cement path around it. How many square feet are in the path?

Well, today I decided to be as graphic as possible. I had him draw a representation of an 8 yard by 6 yard area, using 1" to represent 1 yard (reinforcing some earlier concepts as well). Then I drew the lines to show each "square yard." Then I had David number the squares, 1 to 8, 9 to 16 ... 41 to 48. Then we discussed how 6 x 8 = 48.

Then I drew heavy lines 1 yard inside, and asked him what the dimensions were of the inner rectangle. "What is the length?"
"7 yards. No, 6 yards!"
"What is the width?"
"4 yards."
"So, how many square feet are in the inner rectangle? What is 4 x 6?"
"24"
"24 what?"
"24 yards"
"What kind of yards?"
"Square yards!"

Then I took scissors and cut out the inner rectangle. "So, David, if the inner rectangle were the yard and the outer rectangle is the outside of the path, how many square yards are there in the path? What do you get when you take 24 square yards from 48 square yards?"

Pause. "24 yards ... square?"

"Why don't you count them?" I said. So he did. It helped ... some.

We had to repeat a lot of it for a similar example with a round pool and a path. On that one, he added the areas of the two circles together. He did correctly calculate the areas of the two circles, which was an improvement, because on circle problems sometimes we give him radius and sometimes diameter, and he has to pay close attention to do the right thing. I drew circles, and started to cut out the middle. "What do you do with the areas of the two circles?"
"Multiply? Divide?"
"David, what am I doing with the inner circle?"
"Cutting it."
... and several other things before I said, "I am taking it ... away."
At which point, David said, "Subtracting!"
At least, he seemed sure in the moment.

What I am learning is that it takes lots of reinforcement. David appears to learn something during a lesson, and then he forgets, or forgets to concentrate. BUT ... we are making forward progress!!

Looney Tunes

David has become fascinated with Looney Tunes characters. On the way back from the park today, I heard the boys saying something back and forth to each other (which is not common). Eventually we figured out that they were doing a Looney Tunes "thing": One of them was saying, "Duck Season" and the other was saying "Rabbit Season." From time to time, they reversed this. (This is from a Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argument where bugs tricked Daffy into saying, "Duck Season" whereupon he was immediately shot.)