There comes a time where every child starts the cycle of homework. Being in the kindergarten class, Nariah now brings home homework every week.
Tonight’s task: color the group of objects within a box that is the larger quantity.
Nariah breezed through the first two boxes with no problem. In the third box, there are 6 school buses, 2 columns of 3; and 5 motorcycles, lined up in 2 staggered columns of 3 and 2. I looked over to check on what her brother Toryn was babbling about and when I looked back Nariah had already colored 2 of the motorcycles.
“Baby, you sure you are coloring the right ones?”
“Yes daddy”
“Did you count them?”
“Yep”
“Can you count them out loud for me?”
She counts the motorcycles up to 5. Moving on to the school buses she counts 3 and says there’s a “copy” of the 3 as well beside them. She then and tells me that the 5 motorcycles are more than the sets of “3”. Now, I couldn’t really be disappointed in that, this girl was thinking. While reassuring her that indeed she was right in her statement, I made sure she understood the problem was looking to solve the total number and not just groupings.
“Oh ok daddy, so then I need to color the school buses”
“Yep, just color all of the school buses. I think you won’t have to worry about the motorcycles being a mistake since you only colored two of them.”
“Its ok daddy, I can erase it”
“Baby, that’s crayon you’re using, not a pencil, you won’t be able to erase that”
Nariah doesn’t pay me any attention and pulls out a pencil from her box of drawing utensils.
She clicks to advance the lead and starts “writing” on top of the crayon.
Confused as to why she’s not “erasing” I speak out; “Baby, that’s not going to work, come on, its getting late. Let’s go ahead and color the buses.”
“Uh huh! My friend at school showed me a trick.”
“Nariah….”
“Daddy, I got a trick… you’ll see…”
So now I’m a little anxious to get homework finished but also intrigued, so I let her write all over the colored motorcycles. When she finishes, she flips the pencil over, and proceeds to start erasing. So I’m sitting there… and little by little the crayon actually starts to erase… until it was all gone!
“See….. TOLD YA!” she exclaims with this “daddy, you’re old school, this is new school” look on her face.
There was actually nothing I could say as I just looked at it like “wow”. I finally was able to give Nariah her props after my #EpicFail moment. I have loooooooong days of parenting ahead of me if I’m already being bested by a kindergartner! I don’t remember Mr Wizards World or Electric Company teaching us this trick at all!
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