Corban and math

Hopefully this won't come across to strongly as bragging on Corban, but I am wanting to document what he is accomplishing. Of course, I am proud of what he is able to do, but as far as saying he's smarter than average I don't have any way of knowing and don't think that is important. With that said, I will continue with some of the things Corban has done mathematically lately.

The other day the kids were at the kitchen table talking about a science project Corban and I were planning on doing. The project required 3 cups (it was really 4, but we found that out later) to make the item. Corban had a friend over and he said he wanted to do the project as well. I think it was Corban who said, "Yeah, we could all do it." I replied, since there are six of us here, that would be 6 times 3." Corban immediately said, "Yeah! 6....12....18! We would need 18 cups." I was impressed that not only could he do the multiplication, but that he also thought to start with the bigger number first (of course, that could have just been luck :-).

Kristen also reported how easily he seems to pick up other math concepts. For instance, she was teaching him about the number of cups in a pint and the number of pints in a quart, etc. These are new words that he has not known until the day of the lesson. His assignment was to circle the group that had more liquid given pictures such as 1 pint and 2 cups compared to 7 cups. She said he whipped through that as though he had known about pints and quarts his whole life, while Kristen preferred to check the answer key instead of doing the calculations to see if he was right.

I was in his room one night and he was showing me this tower he had built out of Dynomags. It was a tower that had four balls at the base, four magnetic rods pointing up to four more balls, and so forth. The tower was 7 sets high. He starts counting the balls from one side of the tower by twos. He says, "2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 28. There are 28 balls." I was watching and following him, but he got to 28 so fast he had lost me. Since there were 7 sets, I had to recount (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14) then double it to get 28. Apparently, he just went to 14 in his head and doubled it so quickly while I was still waiting for him to do 14. Kristen and I surmise that he had already counted the number of balls and then did the quick counting to impress me. Ha! No, we don't really think that. He has always liked counting things and has found smart ways to get the right answer pretty quickly.

When he does double digit addition and subtraction, Kristen says he does it all in his head. He does not even write down intermediate steps. She forces him to do the intermediate steps half of the time just to make sure he is understanding the concept. He does.