Ellipse

Ellipse.   See, you can't tell, but I didn't even know how to spell that word correctly.  It got the little red squiggles underneath it, meaning I had added one too many L's or not enough I's.  And was it one P or two?  I think I had one of the vowels wrong as well.  At any rate, thanks to the technology of the spell checker, I look like I knew how to spell ellipse all along.

Yesterday I had a "lesson" from one of the students in the class I was substituting in.  She asked me if I wanted to see her do this particular "work" so I sat beside her while she showed me what she was doing.  Ultimately, she was doing some tracing and then filling in the area with colored pencils.  But the process and what she was learning from that was more important than just the act of tracing.

She went through a set of steps I, myself, would have had difficulty doing with accuracy, but she did the job both carefully and thoroughly.  I was looking at what she was doing and decided to ask her a question about the work.  "What shape is that?" I asked, expecting the answer of "an oval."  But no, she said, "it's an ellipse."  "Oh dear, these three-year-olds might be smarter than I am.  I could be in trouble", I started thinking.

Shortly after that there were two children who wanted to work with some blue shapes.  The teacher said to them, "if you know the name of the shape, you can take it out of the box."  So the two students talked to each other and worked together to remember the names of each shape.  They got them all.

Today, I had to look up online, "names of geometric solids" to remember what they were myself and the first link I got was to a picture of the items they were working with, color and all, from another classroom:

I'm definitely going to have to go back to school to keep up with my children it appears.

The Big Boy Update:  In the car this morning the Happy Birthday song was playing.  I asked my son how old he was and he immediately answered, "I'm twenty-five."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She no longer is bothered by bows in her hair.  She's fairly active and they tend to work themselves out on their own, but at least she's not tearing them (as well as hair) out anymore.