Sunday, April 5, 2009

Are you Smarter than a 4th grader?

Here is yet another vocabulary/math lesson from my 4th ("I should be 5th") grader. The other day Britton asked me, "Mom? Which shapes do not tessellate?"

"What does tessellate mean?"

"It means you can trace the pattern over and over like a hexagon."

He explained to me that bees tessellate by making their honeycomb in hexagon shapes.

Okay, how do you parent this when they are smarter than you?? I even had to look this up in the dictionary to know how to spell it!

Some funnies from the CA trip

We were driving along chatting. Paul told Misi about his employee that crashed in Vegas a few years ago. Whitnee said, "yeah. He was a stalker. He stalked me and Mykelle." Paul said to Whitnee, "spell 'stalker.'" She said, "s-t-o-c-k..." I said, "nope." She then said, "Oh yeah, it's the s-t-a-l-k-e-r one." Then Paul hands me his cell phone and pulls up a text message from Mykelle a few days before. It read, "I can see you pulling into____. I'm behind you." To which Paul replied, "STOCKER!" Yep! He's the spelling champ and loves company in his world. That's why he picked on Whit.

A while later, still driving along, Paul asks me, "how do you spell Arby's?" I can't even respond to that one!

And the best of all....I am navigating and reading the streets we should pass to get to our turn off. Paul is looking at street signs and says, "what about NINth street?" (Think sin, tin, fin, bin sound for NINth street here.) With out looking up, I process it for a second till the light bulb clicks on and I said, "do you mean NINTH (9th) street?" He rolls his eyes and we laugh for a LONG time!

We are a special family!