After seeing how tall my girls were according to the age measurements in the uniform shop, I thought it would be quite interesting to see how other 'real' children compare to such charts. So partly out of interest for me and partly because I thought a bit of real world statistics might interest K & M, I decided to ask for ages, heights and genders of my Facebook friends and folks on a HE group there. I've had lots of responses (thank you!) and have written them down in a table ready to collate in graph form. That's as far as I've got so far though, as K & M decided they really wanted to watch our Matilda video (yes - we still have videos!) this afternoon, having been listening to K's new Matilda - the musical cd, which we bought for her birthday, on a loop over the past few days.
Yesterday evening a FB friend posted a link to this 'mega maths mat', which I thought looked rather good, so I printed a couple out and left them one each on the kitchen table. K hid hers somewhere 'secret' (I don't know if she looked at it first), but happily looked at M's with us over lunch. We briefly talked about each section, spending a bit more time over acute, right, obtuse and reflex angles. The thing that we ended up talking about most was the triangles though and K managed, with just a little nudge to discover how to find the area of a triangle. First I drew a square and rectangle on some squared paper and we recapped about finding the area, then I drew some triangles, and M turned one into a picture of a girl! Then I added a dot to suggest looking for the rectangle with the same base and height as the triangle. K came up with the correct answer for the area of the first triangle, although I'm not entirely sure how she got to it. So we counted the whole squares and paired up the partial ones that seemed to make whole ones, and found the same answer and then finally we came to the formula.
In other news, after going to the library this morning, we went to the park on the way home and happens fairly frequently M decided to climb a tree. In the park there are a few options and today she went for a rather tall pine tree which is a fairly easy climb if you're small enough to get in close to the trunk and light enough for the not particularly big branches to take your weight. It occurred to me that it would actually be a practical application of the trigonometry that I learned at school and haven't ever used, to work out just how high she got, but it was at least as high as the start of the roof on the average two storey house. As her mother it was rather impressive but quite scary!
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