THIS is 3rd Grade?!

My daughter, M, is a pretty smart cookie, and is in the advanced math class at school. What that means is that she is in the 3rd grade, being taught 4th and 5th grade math. Now, I was also an advanced math student back in my day, so I can handle anything thrown at me for silly old 4th grade math, right?

Uh, no.

She had a test on the Wednesday and Thursday before Christmas, and was sent home with a review packet of about 8 pages on Monday. She missed school the previous Wednesday so that we could attend E's USMC graduation in South Carolina, and she missed some of the topics. So it was up to me to figure out how to explain things to her. No problem, right?

Uh, no.

Have you ever heard of a 'factorization tree'? Do you know how to figure the LCM (least common multiple, sheesh)? If you do, then kudos to you; I am apparently backwards in my understanding of today's math education, and had to look them up. Luckily we have good old Google these days, and I pretty quickly managed to find out what they are. In case you're dying to know, a factorization tree breaks down any equation into it's prime numbers, which can be multiplied in any order to get the answer, and while the definition of LCM may be pretty self-explanatory, the process isn't, and is waaay more complicated than I would have expected for even an advanced 3rd grade math class. I don't think I did anything like it until about 6th grade or so.

So, once we figured out what these mysteries were, M seemed to catch on pretty quick, and even thought they were 'cool'. That's my girl. She's really into magic, and loves the idea that math has a lot of 'magical' processes to it.

Me too.

PS - When I chatted with her teacher the following day (found out she aced the test, btw, woohoo!), I learned the charming mnemonic 'Dirty Monkeys Smell Bad', which they use to help with long division. I wish I'd had something like that to help me remember how to do stinkin' long division in Mrs Cadwallader's 4th grade class at Wake Robin Elementary School. Might have helped just a bit. Grrrrr..... I was and still am a 'math person', but I had a tough time understanding long division.