The best laid plans...

Yesterday we were supposed to be meeting up with friends for M's best friend J's birthday and today we were supposed to be meeting up with other friends for the day.  Instead M has come down with something and has spent the past two days on the sofa, mostly sleeping, with some telly watching and some listening to Harry Potter in between.

K is the only one of us who's gone out and that was only because she was so insistent, so after some persuasion I let her go out and she came home within the specified time limit with a get well present for her sister, which she gave to her along with a 'Get Well Now' card she'd made.

Today, while M was asleep, I reminded K of a conversation we had a while back, about doing a bit more maths and asked if she fancied doing some and she said she'd like some funny stories from Maths for Mums & Dads, which has some great anecdotes.  I opened the book pretty much at random and it opened to fractions, so we talked about them.  Over the course of a maybe 10-15 minute conversation we covered the following:

• what they are and that they are one means of expressing part of a whole
• how the two numbers mean
• the terms numerator and denominator
• that we generally use the simplest form, e.g. 1/2 rather than 25/50 and how to get to the simplest form
• mixed fractions
• adding fractions with different denominators
• simplifying the result after the above

 Then while eating lunch, we also watched several Khan Academy videos on the topic.  Afterwards, in an attempt to check that she had understood what we'd talked about, I asked K what she would say if a stranger asked her what she knew about fractions.  She replied in a polite voice, but with a twinkle in her eye 'I would say "It's none of your business what I know about fractions!"', which I thought was fair enough!  When I rephrased the question to ask what she'd say if Granny asked, she showed that she'd grasped what we talked about pretty well.

Other than this K stripped her bed and remade it far more tidily than I would and indeed it is far tidier than the rest of the room!

We also talked, very briefly, about why M's got a temperature and how her body is fighting off the infection with white blood cells.  Hopefully it'll have made good progress in the battle by the morning.