Dot to Descartes

Larkin and Finn have both very much enjoyed dot to dots in the past. Finn, especially, seemed to really like them, and (partly because they were the first thing to really inspire him to put pencil to paper) I printed out quite a few for him. However, once they had fully mastered the whole counting thing, connect the dots slowly lost its appeal. I did find a few really challenging ones (hundreds of small dots, different series with gaps you were supposed to leave disconnected, etc.) but we had eventually worn the interest out of the concept.

Then I remembered when I was introduced to the Cartesian coordinate system in junior high school Algebra. Several problem sets consisted of sets of points to plot that, when connected in the proper order, would form a picture. Clearly, this is the logical next step for kids who adore connect the dots!

With the help of some Facebook friends, I found a couple of websites that had the sort of thing I was after. One had some simple pictures, and the other let you enter your own secret message which it would encode into x,y-coordinates.

Finn LOVED this and sat for about an hour plotting out his secret message. He almost fell off his chair when he realized part of the message was his name (I may have neglected to mention that I encoded the message-- I think he assumed it was just a random print-out I found on the internet). He sometimes needed help remembering which dot he had drawn last so he knew where to draw the lines, but otherwise it was all him.

Yep, Jenny loves Finn. Deep stuff. Larkin enjoyed the exercise too, although hers was completed over several days rather than a single frenetic hour.  Discussions of positive and negative integers, not to mention math history and Descartes, were also had, although (and I'm not sure how) I think the conversation somehow morphed into a google search for images of crop circles.

I have yet to have my fantasy conversation with a random person on the street in which I get to say, "Why, yes, my five year old does enjoy plotting Cartesian coordinates."