Larkin asked Janey (our favorite local 12 year old who comes over three hours every Wednesday morning to play with the kids and give me a break) to pick 100 leaves for her yesterday. This is the latest in a whole string of interesting numbers/math questions that make it clear she's trying to conceptualize bigger numbers. In the car she will often put a finger up every time she sees a particular item (horses are a favorite) between our house and town. Then when we reach our destination she asks the total. In the beginning, she would hold up her hands and ask. Soon, she started describing her hands to us: "How many is it if I have all the fingers on one hand and two on the other?" Then she started counting them herself. Today I heard her skip the counting step: "I have all the fingers on one hand and three on the other... eight!" Sometimes she has to recruit someone else's hands before it's time to total them up. All this to say, I guess she has progressed beyond base 5. ;)On a related note, she wanted to know how many people there are "on our planet" (I love that the question left the possibility for life on *other* planets... or, perhaps, that other people own the other planets). I told her I thought there were about 6 billion (subsequent googling revealed that we're actually closer to 7 billion these days). "Does everyone have the same number of fingers and toes?" Well, a few people have a couple extra, some people have lost a few... but on average, yeah, most people have 20. "So how many finger and toes are there in the whole wide world?" Well, I guess that would make it about 120 billion. "Wow, that's a lot." Yup.
Apparently, soon after this conversation, Larkin made Emile attempt to describe for her exactly how many cupcakes 100 billion would be. Logical next step? "How about 100 billion and 30?"
A couple weeks ago we went through a period of intensively reading the "How much is a million" book illustrated by Stephen Kellogg. It has been a while since we have read the book, but the interest in numbers is still going strong.
Okay, if you made it this far, you deserve gratuitous cuteness:
Contemporaneous naps are almost unheard of, but quite the photo-op when they happen.
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And in this as in all things Finn seems to want to do what his big sister does ;) He's still at the stage where I find any and all of his counting totally adorable. Particularly when Larkin convinces him to play hide and seek and he's covering his eyes and trying to count so she can hide while hopping up and down with excitement to go find her.
ReplyDeleteBoy, us gushy parents must get really old after awhile...
Yeah, but it takes a few years... ;)
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