The number of the day

When you accidentally hit upon a way to get the house tidied up, teach the pre-schooler to count and introduce multiplication to your third grader all at once, you just have to share it.

I came up with the idea of the number of the day yesterday and I'll be honest with you - I had only one motive and that was to get some help picking up the clutter that had somehow exploded in our home. The number was five and we each picked up five things in each room that was suffering from excess clutter. Before we got out of the kitchen, Little Man could count to five and really understood what he was doing - you know, not just pointing at one object and saying, "three, four, five." For some reason, it just stuck this time. Excellent! Then it occurred to me to ask Z-Man, "if there are three of us and we each pick up five things, how many is that? How would you write it on the white board?"

Today our number was three. Z-Man was in favor of that, thinking that it meant less work. Much to his chagrin, we did "sets" of three, as in, "pick up three sets of three things from the floor in your room. How many is that? What if I pick up three sets of three too? How could you illustrate that on the white board? What are two ways to write that equation?"

Oh yes, we know how to have fun here. Don't try to stop us.