Thursday, December 20, 2007

Signs of Critical Thinking

Kids think quite a bit. They soak things up like little sponges. But sometimes young learning is very black and white. Last night, as we were getting ready for bed, Jordan & Mikayla were showing off their color blending knowledge.

"Red and white makes my favorite color, pink" says Mikayla.
"Blue and yellow make green" says Jordan.
"What colors make violet?" asks Mikayla.
"Blue & purple make violet, Mikayla. Violet is a purply blue" replies Jordan.

This continues through many color blends. Then Jordan said, "Red and white and purple make magenta".

Mikayla looked to me for confirmation, "Wow, JT! That was a hard one. You learned that at school."

"I didn't learn that at school and I didn't guess. I thought about it. I know purple and pink make magenta and red and white make pink. So, red, white, and purple make magenta."

I believe that may be basic algebra! His black & white learning has just gotten a little grey =)



Patterns

They teach kids patterns now. I must admit, I would get the notes home from school every week about what they learned. "This week we discussed AB patterns." I had no idea what the teacher was talking about. Is this what they call the new math, I wondered. It was just never described to me like that.

Jordan comes home and talks about what he learned and tells Mikayla. So she is learning right along with him. Mikayla had on a striped shirt and she said, "Mom, I have on an ABC pattern shirt." I looked, silver, light blue, blue, silver, light blue, blue. Sure enough she had on an ABC pattern shirt.

Then Jordan said, I have an ABCDEF pattern shirt. His sleeves had very thin clumps of stripes. Sure enough, I looked at each grouping of stripes and they were the same. It was an ABCDEF pattern shirt.


Sweetness

Jordan talks fondly about a lot of his classmates. But when he was asked to draw a picture and name his best friend, this is what he drew:

In case you can't make it out he says "My best friend's name is Mikala". That does a mom's heart good. I LOVE that they are so close!

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