Mostly maths

I have been hearing various folks talking about DragonBox in a very positive away for quite some time now, but it was only yesterday evening that I finally got around to having a closer look.  I decided to take the plunge and bought the DragonBox algebra 5+.  I installed it this morning and M had a look, solving the first few problems easily, but it didn't really grab her.  I gave a little mental sigh, thinking that I had just wasted some (admittedly not much, as it's only $5.99, which was £4) money.  Then K sat down and had a go and she didn't stop until she had completed all 200 problems a few hours later!  I sat with her for the first few dozen, but then left her to it.  She is very keen for me to buy the 12+ version, but it isn't available for PC yet, so I've suggested she go back over the problems where she didn't get all three stars and we transfer what she's learned to paper problems while we're waiting and she seems really keen.  For each problem, you have to solve it to move on and get one star for doing so, but you also get a star for doing so without using any extra 'cards' (which you can add/multiply/divide to each side of the equation to get there) or extra moves.  It's very clever in the way that it moves from using pictures, gradually through to numbers and letters to become a recognisable algebraic equation.

While K was busy with that, M & I read another of the Maths Quest books, The Planet of Puzzles, which problems about data handling to solve, including reading various types of graph and diagram among other things.  She did really well, making only one mistake, although I got the feeling that most of the time she saw it as common sense and really quite obvious what the answers were, rather than having to work things out.

Apart from that, M has been out on her (newly handed down from K) bike today.  She rode round the block a couple of times and then came out with me when I popped to the Co-op and stayed riding in the park while I did the shopping. 

We continued with Going Solo, after a few days break, which dealt with the beginning of World War Two and Dahl's journey from Dar es Salaam, to Nairobi to enlist with the RAF and then on to Cairo and then Iraq for training and we kept jumping up to follow his progress on our world map.  And speaking of our world map, we had a message to say that our first postcrossing postcard had a arrived, so hopefully it won't be long before we've got a postcard of our own to put up there!