Last night, Brandi needed help with her homework, especially math. She is in fifth grade this year, and they are starting the year off doing long division. Last year, she started learning the basics, doing simple long division. This year, the problems are getting harder. Her teacher gave her a "cheat sheet" with ways to figure out if certain numbers, like 2 or 3 can divide into a bigger number evenly. You would think that giving the kids shortcuts would make things easier, but not for my child. I had to help her with just about every problem, because it is hard for her to remember the cheats for each number.
For instance, we all know that if a number is even, it is divisible by 2. Or if it ends in a 5 or a 0 it is divisible by 5. Those are the easy cheats. Trying to remember the others was hard for her, and to be honest, I didn't even know some of them, like the one that says that if you add the individual digits of a number together and that number is divisible by 9, then the number itself is also. To me, it's just simpler to do the problem outright, but I'm not the teacher.
I want to be able to help her remember these tricks, as well as make sure she does well in all her other subjects. She loves to be on the computer at night, and instead of being on Facebook, I may have her start doing some brain teasers for kids. I love playing sudoku free online, and last year, her teacher taught the kids how to play that, so I may encourage her to play online too.
She is super smart, even testing perfectly on the hardest advanced placement test they have at her school. I know it's just a matter of memorization to get her to remember the math tricks. If only there was a trick to remembering the tricks.
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