Creative Writing

Today I wrote my first “Observing for Learning” report for the new learning year. Among the various subjects I spoke about was the artwork and story writing that Daughter did over the summer. I always laugh to myself when I write about these endeavours of hers, as I recall a family member asking us – upon hearing about our plans to unschool – how our kids would ever learn handwriting if they directed their own learning (stating that no child would want to sit down and do handwriting sheets over and over). This has certainly not been a problem as you will see. Here are just some examples of Daughter’s creative writing…

First, she loves to create books, “publishing” them under the name of her own company, Orca Books (on this year’s Learning Plan she listed the desire to create a website for her company so she can make her books available online). We have several books lying around the house with the Orca Books name and logo on them. One of my favorites is called “The Planet” and the title page was decorated with various animals and plants (I can’t figure out how to blank out her surname, so in the interest of privacy I won’t post the image here). Pages included “Under the Ground” which showed various animals and insects that live underground, “Blood”, “Air”, and “Cells”. Here is the page on Blood (the title got cut off by my scanner):

The page starts at the cellular level with three kinds of blood cells: red blood cell, macrophage, and platelet. The drop of blood shows what these cells look like as blood. At the organ level is the heart (the sound waves to the right indicate the heartbeat) and then she shows the networks of arteries and veins in the body.

Another page showed the various kinds of cells in the body: the three blood cell types are shown here again, as well as bone cells (ordered in their structure) and also a virus invading a host cell and injecting DNA.

She was not yet 8 years old when she made this and did it all of her own accord; I didn’t know about it until she showed me the finished product, and I must say I was pretty impressed that such a young child has such a solid grasp of this subject. Just goes to show you how far a child can go when they are passionate about a subject and have the freedom to pursue it.

Besides making non-fiction books, she also engaged in story writing. Here is one example where she experimented with dividing her story into chapters. You can see that she hasn’t remembered to put spaces in between her words, and her spelling is sometimes hard to decipher. I think it goes without saying that I didn’t point any of this out when she proudly showed me her story – what a horrible way to burst someone’s bubble. I have, however, mentioned it in passing on other occasions. Sometimes she remembers and sometimes she doesn’t. I love that she is so immersed in her creative process that she’s not really thinking about this yet. It will come, however, of that I have no doubt. Her spelling has improved immensely over the years, as has her penmanship and grammar. All just from experience with reading and writing. Meantime, I just love that she loves to write!

Here is a transcription of the story:

The Blue Whale Bay.

Chapter 1: Meeting Orca

Once in a small city there was an Orca. The Orca heard a bang on the door. “Bang Bang Bang!”. An eel came out and grabbed him and tossed him in the kelp.

Chapter 2: Help

The Orca heard “Help!”. A small voice said “Help!”. Orca said “Are you lost? Hurt?”. “Both” said the ??? [sic].

Chapter 3: Lost Hurt ???

“Where are you?” said Orca. “Blue Whale Bay” said ???.

Chapter 4: Blue Whale Bay

Orca swam and got to it. Stuck in the baleen of a blue whale was a sea horse. Orca pushed him out.

The End

Finally, I wanted to share some creative artwork. Daughter loves to listen to audio books at night while lying in bed. We get them from the library and so have a varied selection over a period of a week or two before we return them for more. One week a favorite story (for both kids – they share a room) was Electrotaur and Smashermite. After listening to this story there was a flurry of creative activity inventing variations on the “-taur” and “-mite” series of monsters. Some were “serious” monsters while others were more whimsical. Here are a couple of examples:

In our home, art is not treated as being any more or less serious or important than any other topic of interest. We also use learning funds to purchase proper art supplies, so that the children feel that their work is valued (rather than hearing that they aren’t “good enough” for the “real thing”). Still, as you can see, her favorite paper is still simple lined sheets or blank printer pages. The bright colours, however, come from a lovely set of coloured pencils unlike anything I’ve found in the school supplies section.

It’s pretty interesting having a child that is passionate about both art and science. I myself am Science all the way – pretty challenged in the artistic department. On the other hand, her father’s family leans towards artistic talent and Husband can draw and sketch very well (though it is not a hobby for him). These days Daughter will tell you that when she grows up she is going to be both a marine biologist and a scientific illustrator !

Orcas and Fossils and Puppets, oh my!

We’ve come to the end of another learning year, at least in terms of our homeschooling program. Nothing has changed for the kids – learning happens all year round for them. But Daughter has been up to some fun stuff lately and since I don’t get to put it down in a report for our program anymore (at least, not until September), I thought I’d post it here.

One day I found her in her room with various reference books on ocean life spread out before her. She was busy writing away on a stack of fresh printer paper with a set of coloured highlighter pens she pilfered from the computer desk. I had to stop myself from telling her that those weren’t for her use and didn’t she know that printer paper was expensive…but it wasn’t hard to suppress my inner nag when I saw what she was doing. Sometimes you just have to let go of the price of printer paper and highlighter pens and embrace spontaneous creativity when it happens! Daughter was making a book about sea creatures and she’d made up her own publishing company, Orca Books, complete with logo which was drawn on the title page. She had written down the names of various sea creatures with notes about each one to create a book she called “Ocean Life”. Orca Books has since published more books and informational brochures on the topic of marine biology, which can be found scattered around various rooms in our home.

This is the kind of activity I think of when people suggest that kids will never learn to write (one of the Three R’s: reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic) if not drilled with worksheets. Writing happens here all the time; it’s a tool that is so ubiquitous in our culture that I honestly can’t understand how a child could NOT learn to write if allowed to learn naturally. Obviously, reading figured into this activity as well;  I will never understand the logic behind making a child read a specific book that they didn’t even get to choose. But, I digress…!

On another day, Daughter approached me to ask for some garbage bags. She told me she was making a costume. Over the next 24 hours I watched as she drew, cut, painted, glued, and taped various things together to make an Orca costume for herself. It was pretty amazing. This was a lengthy project and quite complex in its execution. First, she made a body piece by cutting holes for her head and arms in one bag. She then laid it out on the table and painted half of it silver, to match the white colouring of an Orca whale. She cut out and glued on a dorsal fin. Then she took an old T-shirt and attached cut-out fins to each sleeve. This was to be worn under the body piece. the tail was cut to resemble a whale’s tail. By this time the silver paint on the body piece had dried overnight and she was unsatisfied with the result. So she peeled off the paint and used cut-out white paper instead, which she glued onto the body and tail pieces. She even had the foresight to cut out holes in the bottom of the tail piece through which she could put her feet. Finally, she made a mask, complete with white “eye spots” and tied to her head with string. Taking the end result at face value it wasn’t the greatest Orca costume in the world, but what went into it was the really exciting part. This was not the usual free-form, play-based, exploratory learning. This was planning and execution, working towards a specific outcome. This is a big step in her development (which I can appreciate all the more fully after hearing Gordon Neufeld talk recently) and I’ve been seeing a burst of this sort of activity in the last few weeks.

Our local homelearners group recently organized a trip to a fossil museum, complete with side trip to an open fossil bed where we were allowed to hunt for our own fossils. The small section of rocky beach beside an eroded cliff face exposed shale that was once at the bottom of the sea (the Island we live on is relatively new in geologic age, having been pushed up out of the water by tectonic plate movement). The shale readily chips apart into layers, exposing ammonites and clam imprints.

Once the guide showed us what to look for we were able to find several specimens. Most were partial imprints of clam shells, with one or two worm holes and fossilized plant bits. I was particularly excited because I recognized the terrain we were in – I’d passed something very similar in my walks around our forest neighbourhood. When I next got the chance I went by this spot – the trail goes down alongside an exposed wall where one section looks as if it were gouged out by a giant shovel (perhaps it was, or perhaps it was exposed naturally). The rock there looks exactly the same as the stuff by the river. Sure enough, when I started prying bits of shale apart it wasn’t long before I found clam imprints. A fossil bed right by our home! Turns out there are fossils even beneath our feet – the neighbours were clearing some rocks out of their field and found a big clam fossil, which they gave to Daughter. Who knew when we moved here that we’d be in paleontologist heaven!

One evening while Husband was away on business, Son and I were treated to a late-night puppet show. Daughter had come up with this idea all on her own – I love the characters she made! There were three groups: water life, sky life, and alien life (the last was for her brother, who prefers alien characters over animals these days). She put on a little show with the puppets while Son and I were lying in bed (when Husband is away the kids and I sleep together) and she was down at the end of the bed on the floor. The story soon degenerated into the kind of chaotic non-sensical stuff that meant it was definitely time for sleep, but up until that point it was much fun. I love how these creative urges just hit her at random times during the day (she started this project long after dinner). We went to bed later than usual that night, in part because she was so engaged in what she was doing and I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of creative energy. It’s nice that we can do this since we don’t usually “have” to be up at any specific time in the morning.

Enid Blyton is Rolling in her Grave

When I was nine years old, a family friend whose children had grown and moved out of the home presented me with a huge box full of books. Most of them were by Enid Blyton, books that her children had read and enjoyed, and they were now being passed on to me. I devoured them, and for years looked everywhere for Famous Five or Secret Seven books. When I grew up I kept some of them (I’m not really sure what happened to the rest).

Years later I found myself with a daughter who is about the age when voracious readers such as herself become interested in chapter books. Well, actually she seems a bit behind on that front compared to other early readers I know. I tried a while back with a Magic Treehouse book, but after reading a chapter or two she requested that we go back to the picture books we get at the library each week. Until last week, that is. I was rummaging around and found my old Enid Blyton books. I decided to give it a try with her again. I asked if we could read a chapter or two from this book (Five Go To Billycock Hill), and then we’d do one of her books.

I’m delighted to say that she immediately took to them (probably because the Famous Five include a rather clever dog) and we ended up reading several chapters that night and never got to her other books. Every night since then we’ve read chapters from the book, both she and I enjoying them to the point where I often relent to read “just one more chapter!” because I myself am caught up in the story.

These books were originally written in the 1940′s and take place in England. They are an amazing glimpse into the lifestyle of the past. The way the children speak is so quaint, with lots of “Oh, do let’s!”, “Jolly good!”, and “Rather!”. One of my favorite memories is the way Blyton described the meals the children would eat when out camping or hiking (which they did alone, by the way, the eldest being only 15 and the youngest around 10). Bought from local farmers, which were everywhere it seemed, the children dined on “creamy milk” (doubtless raw), fresh bread and home-churned butter, home-made marmalade and jam, cured hams from the farm’s own pigs, and fresh eggs. Even Daughter, who is notoriously selective in her tastes, lamented that the meals sounded so good that she wished she liked more foods!

Sandwiches were wrapped in paper, tents were canvas sheets set up with pegs and strong branches. Drinks were bought in glass bottles and doled out in cardboard cups. The total absence of plastic is hard to miss. The kids slept in “rugs” rather than sleeping bags, and each child always carried a pocket-knife.

There are some darker sides to the old ways that are also captured in these books. Corporal punishment was frequently mentioned (although generally not in a favourable light). There was rampant sexism; the girls were treated more like delicate flowers and relegated to tasks such as preparing the picnic lunch or washing up afterwards while the boys went off and did the more “manly” chores. The tom-boy George (short for Georgina) was never accorded the same privileges as the boys even though she was tough as nails. The children attended unisex boarding schools and had nannies/housekeepers at home (Daughter was quite astounded by the concept of a boarding school, wondering how any child could want to be away from home so much). There is a stereotyping of “bad guys” as being “common”, disheveled, and otherwise down on their luck. And regular glimpses of war-time attitudes towards “traitors” and “the enemy”. Some of her stories go even further: the current one we are reading involves a trip to Africa where the “savages” are described with typical Colonial-style discrimination and stereotyping. In others she paints a rather intolerant view of “Gypsies”. I don’t recall noticing these much as a child reading the stories, and I suspect the significance is largely over the head of Daughter, too. Those issues that do strike her as odd are questioned and discussed, and overall I think the benefits of this “look into the past” outweigh any political incorrectness found in the tales.

And so it was that we went to the library and decided to see if they had any Enid Blyton books. The librarian pointed them out to me, but informed me that they were “modern editions” that had been “fully revised”. She commented that the originals were “totally inappropriate” for a public library and that I would not find them in any branch. I picked one up and noted with dismay the Saturday-morning-cartoon style illustrations on the front cover.

When I opened a modern Famous Five book to sample the stories I was further dismayed. Not only was the style of writing as foreign from Enid Blyton as Douglas Coupland is from Walden, they’d actually changed the names of the children! I guess the name “Dick” would apparently elicit too much adolescent giggling to be taken seriously, while Julian’s nickname “Ju” probably rolled off the tongue in too politically-incorrect a manner. The modern prose and the complete removal of any flavour of mid-century England resulted in a book that, had I not seen her name on the cover, I would simply never have recognized as her own.

Blyton was born in 1897 and died in the same year I was born. Doubtless someone recently decided to capitalize on her immense fame as a children’s author, purchased the rights to her name and book titles, and then completely redid every element of the story. It was truly tragic, and my heart ached. I resolved then and there to hunt down as many of the old versions as I could find (I recently picked one up at the local thrift store, and I know used paperback bookstores generally have a good selection). I was also greatly saddened that the legacy of such a fine author had been obliterated by political correctness and the glaringly obvious assumption that North American children could simply never relate to their grandparents’ childhood experiences (and would never want to). I mean, how on earth could you ever solve a good mystery without a cell phone and a laptop? It’s a most despicable affront to literature, in my humble opinion. But this also provided a great topic of discussion for myself and Daughter who, I’m proud to say, is as uninterested in the modern versions as I am.

I cannot help but feel convinced that if Enid Blyton were alive today to see how her name has been prostituted she would be horrified. I hope, however, she would also take some comfort in knowing that those of us who grew up on her stories (after a previous generation had already done so), are proudly sharing them with our own children and making clear the distinction between her marvelously adventurous tales and the Scooby-Doo Gang knockoffs that prostitute her name in a blatant attempt to bolster sales. I’m truly sickened and saddened by these modern books and hope that today’s children will not be deprived of knowing her true charm, wit, and style. Not to mention, the priceless opportunity to engage our children in a bit of history.

Edited to add (July 30, 2010): It turns out I was incorrect in my understanding of the new Famous Five series. I recently learned that this series is not a re-write but a new series whose characters are the children of the original Famous Five kids. However, not only has this series been met with criticism by some Blyton fans (see this Wikipedia page for a brief discussion) but the original series has been altered by certain publishers and removed from libraries (see this Wikipedia page; scroll down to “Controversies and revisions”) as we discovered when we looked for them at our local library. Having recently bought some modern print editions of the Famous Five books from eBay, I will have to check to see if these have been “cleaned up”.

Handwriting, Naturally

A couple of years ago I was trying to explain the philosophy of unschooling to my very traditional MIL and SIL. They were having a hard time believing that kids would just willingly, and of their own accord, learn all the things they “needed” to learn. Oh sure, they could understand wanting to do craft projects, playing soccer, and maybe even doing some fun science experiments. But MIL felt that there were certain things no child would want to do, and the example she gave was handwriting. “How many children would sit there and practice their handwriting if they weren’t made to do it?”, she asked, recalling evenings spent with her eldest grandchild supervising the filling of worksheet pages for homework.

I can’t blame MIL for thinking this way because several years ago I likely would have thought the same as her. The same as most people in our society. There’s this belief that certain subjects just plain “aren’t any fun”, but are necessary for a proper education, and therefore children must be coerced into doing them. The first problem with this paradigm is so few people have ever seen Natural Learning take place that it’s unbelievable to them that kids can remain curious, driven, and inquisitive about the world around them long after the toddler years. The second problem is the notion that forced, fact-based learning is the optimal, if not the only, way for children to learn.

If you stop and think about it, it’s pretty difficult to get far in this world without writing, even if you are a small child. At the very least, children tend to be possessive; writing one’s name on a project, placemat, or book is often one of the first times kids encounter the benefits of having such a skill. But more than that, we live in a world of words. Kids encounter them everywhere and are naturally drawn (when they are developmentally ready) to acquire the skills of reading and writing, in the same way (I presume) that a human child living 20,000 years ago would naturally be driven to acquire the hunting and gathering skills that he witnessed every day. I’ve yet to hear of a child who, if left to his/her own devices, does not at some point become interested in picking up a pencil and writing letters.

And so it was with Daughter. She started writing letters when she was about 3 years old and is now able to write whole sentences. Nobody has ever “taught” her how, nor did she ever ask. It came about Naturally. She loves to draw, make up stories, and create games and all these things are enhanced by the use of the printed word. Here are some recent examples of her work:

Last week she picked up a blank greeting card and did the following:

Later that week, she decided to prepare a surprise for me when I came home from work. She made eight little cards out of cardstock by cutting out rectangles and folding them in half. She then wrote “clues” on them, which I followed around the house, picking up the next card and clue, until I came to the “treasure” at the end: her, hiding in the closet! She had no help with this activity, in fact nobody knew she was doing it until she got her brother and father to give it a test run.

You can clearly see in this first card that she is taking care as she works; she crossed out the line that had too many errors for her liking and started it again. Here are some more cards in the series:

Finally, a while back she found a toy catalog inserted into our regional paper. She was concerned that she wouldn’t remember to ask for certain favorites by the time it was Christmas, so she decided she should write her letter to Santa early:

This sort of thing has been going on for years, and every year her writing gets neater, the letters more even in size, her spelling more accurate. Practice makes perfect, so they say, but who says practice has to mean writing “Jill and Jack ran with Spot” over and over again at a time when one would much rather be outside enjoying a sunny day? I can think of a million fun and spontaneous ways that a child can get to practice their handwriting without the need for worksheets (unless they like that sort of thing), homework, and forced assignments.

Having hopefully given a small demonstration of how Natural Learning applies to handwriting, an important issue I’d like to mention is that of correcting a child’s work.

How well I can still visualize my lined note book from elementary school, filled with short stories and sentences we’d been instructed to write, marred by bright red slash marks. The teacher would correct my work by rewriting my words with the proper spelling in the same bright red marker. I remember looking at my writing in terms of how many mistakes I’d made, not what I’d written, nor how well I’d progressed, but by the number of red slashes on the page. The exercise seemed pointless to me, other than a way to be tallied up and compared against the rest of the class (fortunately I was good at writing, so my self-esteem didn’t suffer). Some might think the role of teacher and the process of learning necessarily includes making those red marks and comments all over a page. But now I look at it in a whole new way, and it truly saddens me.

Life in the Free Learning world is so much different. You’ll notice in the examples above there are several mistakes. Some letters are written backwards, words are misspelled, and the grammar isn’t always perfect either. Some might think it prudent to point out these mistakes to Daughter. “How else will she learn the right way?” they might ask.

My daughter wrote those things without having any idea that she was “practicing her handwriting”. Nobody sat her down and said “now we’re going to practice our writing”. Nobody told her that the point of her creative efforts was to be grammatically correct. Instead, my daughter had an idea to do something that she thought would be fun for her (the dino card), a special way to say how much she appreciates her family (the card treasure hunt), and a practical way to ensure desired toys don’t get forgotten before Christmas (the list). Writing was simply a tool to accomplish all those things, it was not the point of the exercise.

Now imagine your child presenting you with a card hunt when you come home from work. How would you feel if someone had come before you and crossed out her mistakes with an angry red marker? Or written those words for her with the correct spelling and punctuation? How would YOU feel if you were her and someone did that to your work? If your child was sensitive, they might end up feeling inadequate, stupid, their confidence might drop. If they were stubborn they might feel angry at having their hard work ruined by someone else’s doodling. But I’m quite certain they would not give their thanks and appreciation for “helping them to learn the right way”. Chances are they would think twice before venturing to be so creative and spontaneous again.

So what to do with the mistakes? Mostly, I do nothing. My daughter knows what an “S” looks like, she just happens to write it backwards sometimes. If I asked her to take a close look at it, she would recognize her mistake right away. So what would be the point of correcting her, other than to steal away her pride, her confidence, and to entirely miss the point of what she was doing? If I saw a consistent error (she almost always draws her 4′s backwards) I might ask her to look closely. I would guage her reaction – for Daughter, she usually laughs and says “oops, I wrote it backwards” – before going any further. If she got upset or frustrated I would ask if she’d like some help and together we could come up with ways for her to practice getting it right. Since she’s not upset, and obviously knows what a 4 is supposed to look like, I see no problem. As for spelling and grammar, I’m also confident that she will figure out the right way as she goes along, and will either correct herself or ask for help if and when she decides its a problem.

Summer Happenings

It is mid-July now which means Summer is in full swing. Many people ask us whether we “take the summer off”, still not quite understanding that we Learn just by Living our lives and so the question doesn’t make much sense. It’s true that the learning year is over in our DL program and so I’m not having to write weekly reports. And it’s true that Son is now finished with preschool, and there are no weekly classes or structured activities going on. But somehow learning still seems to happen.

We’ve been doing alot of hiking lately, especially now that we have a dog. Here’s a shot of the kids making silly faces on our local section of the Baden-Powell trail.

Son has suddenly decided he’s interested in crafting. He has never really drawn nor coloured, whereas his sister was scribbling before she was 2. I know that this is common for boys, who seem to develop the fine motor skills used in drawing and handwriting later than girls. It has never bothered me, since I’m a firm believer in the unschooling principle that trying to teach a child something they aren’t developmentally ready for is a waste of time. I left him to decide when he was ready and sure enough, one day a few weeks ago he decided to join us during a session of drawing and colouring. He has since participated in a few crafts, is doing rudimentary printing work, and generally just unfolding the way he is uniquely designed to do, and at his own pace. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Recently we went on a five day camping trip through the Thompson-Okanagan and South Okanagan regions of BC. We swam in lakes and rivers, the kids made friends with fellow campsite kids, the grownups relaxed and enjoyed the weather and lovely scenery.

One day, at the campground shown above, Husband was scribbling some notes in his workbook when Daughter asked if she could write in his book, too. The book is a lab notebook with graph paper sheets. She asked her father to give her words and she would try to spell them. After several words she asked if they could do some math. After some addition and subtraction she wanted to move on to multiplication, and so I told Husband about the game of drawing sets that she and I had done over the last few months. It was neat to see how Husband approached things and explained things, different from the way I did which I thought was good for Daughter to get different perspectives and ways of thinking.

I know I say this all the time here, but it still never ceases to delight me: the fact that children can actually see writing and math as just another fun activity, like playing on the swings, or swimming, or watching videos. I think this is one of the many blessings of not having kids in school: they don’t separate academic activities from anything else they do in their day.

And so depsite the fact that our days are slow and lazy, unstructured, and without much in the way of pre-scheduled activities (just the way I like ‘em), the kids are growing and learning and delighting in their Unconventional Life.

Fun with Fractions

I haven’t been writing much about unschooling lately. Mostly it’s because I write a report each week for Daughter’s homelearner program. Also because this blog is partly for me; writing out thoughts and experiences helps me to process them. But  I really would like this blog to be a place someone can come to if they are interested in, or curious about, unschooling to see what it looks like In Real Life.

Here’s a recent experience: The other night Daughter asked if I would look at a library book with her. It was Fraction Action. She had already read it, and had this idea that we could draw out the examples of fractions given in the book.

I’m sorry this isn’t rotated correctly; I’m having import issues. We started with a circle I drew that Daughter then divided into halves. I wrote “1/2″ on one side and she wrote it on the other. She then drew examples of halves from the story: a sandwich cut in half (middle row, left) and (continuing from left to right) a glass half full of juice, a dish with half vanilla and half chocolate ice cream, then (going down to the third row) a garden plot with half vegetables and half flowers, a muffin cut in half, a piggy bank half full, and a framed image of a cow jumping over half a moon.

We then moved onto thirds, repeating the sequence. You can see a flower with three petals, a chocolate-chip cookie divided into three peices, a court jester’s hat with three “tassles”, a wallet with three folds (and a dollar bill edge along the top), and a beach towel with three stripes.

Finally, we did quarters. She again divided the circle I drew, and wrote the fractions. She drew (from the book) a hot dog cut into four peices, a dollar bill folded into fourths (here she drew 4 lines, an easy mistake; she laughed when I asked her to count the number of sections she made and she found she had five), a cracker broken into four pieces, a four-leafed clover, and a pie cut into four peices.

With each pictured I’d asked her “what is this section called” and she’d answer “a half; a third, a quarter”.

We then reviewed how to write fractions, as she didn’t remember from the last time we’d worked on this stuff and asked me to show her again. I drew a circle with six sections and made one of them shaded. I showed her that the top number of a fraction was the number of shaded bits, and the bottom number was the total number of bits. We then practiced with me drawing sectioned shapes, then moving on to flower petals, and dinosaurs. Of course she enjoyed the dinosaurs. An example question I gave her was “What is the fraction describing the plates on this Stegosaurus’ back?” (which I’d drawn with one dark and three light coloured plates) and she’d say “a fourth” and I’d write 1/4. Then she asked if  SHE could draw some puzzles for me:

First she asked me to write the fraction that represents the number of dinosaurs with babies and eggs. Next she asked me to do the number of fish with stripes or spots. Finally, the number of jellyfish that are alive (we both had a good laugh at that one; note the dead jellyfish on the bottom right!). When I was done she said she hadn’t realized that she’d done all the same fraction!

I’d like to point out that this was ALL HER IDEA. She guided the whole activity. To be honest, it was evening and I was tired and I really didn’t feel like it at first. But I’m glad I did, because it ended up being fun.