I had an interesting glimpse into the workings of DS's brain today. I was volunteering in his classroom and the kids were taking a pretest for a geometry unit. Some questions asked them to calculate the perimeter of some shapes. None of kids had been introduced to the word perimeter so no one knew how to do it. About 2/3 of the kids just measured one side and wrote down that number. About 1/3 of kids just left it blank.
But DS came up with an elaborate solution. He drew lines bisecting each corner and going into the middle of the polygon. He predicted that they would each end up being the same length and that the length of one of them would be the perimeter (he also has never been introduced to the word). He measured each line carefully and wrote the length next to it, measuring to the quarter of a cm even though the ruler was only divided into 1/2 cm markings. He was slightly stumped when they weren't the same but decided that he should "average" them (he didn't use that term, just the concept). But because he didn't know how to divide 1/4, he wrote his answer as
2 1/2 of 1/4.
I thought this was pretty interesting. What elaborate and unique approaches has your child taken to an unknown problem?
But DS came up with an elaborate solution. He drew lines bisecting each corner and going into the middle of the polygon. He predicted that they would each end up being the same length and that the length of one of them would be the perimeter (he also has never been introduced to the word). He measured each line carefully and wrote the length next to it, measuring to the quarter of a cm even though the ruler was only divided into 1/2 cm markings. He was slightly stumped when they weren't the same but decided that he should "average" them (he didn't use that term, just the concept). But because he didn't know how to divide 1/4, he wrote his answer as
2 1/2 of 1/4.
I thought this was pretty interesting. What elaborate and unique approaches has your child taken to an unknown problem?
