Homework Again

Here are some scenes from homework time last Monday.  Mr. SP only has homework on Mondays.  It involves using the children’s dictionary, which he actually really enjoys.  At first he was not a fan of the dictionary, but it has really grown on him.  Liking the dictionary is a good thing.  YaYa has homework every night.  She is not a fan of homework.  Even worse than doing the homework is the task of putting the homework back in the backpack so it isn’t forgotten in the chaos of the morning.  YaYa just doesn’t ever seem to get the homework back in her backpack without a lot of nagging on my part.  When I don’t nag, and even sometimes when I do, I find homework in her room, on the fireplace mantel, in the dining room, on the kitchen counter, on the office table, on my desk, and one time I even found a math worksheet on the back of the toilet in the bathroom.

The other day YaYa had a math paper that was all about inductive reasoning.  One of the problems was a puzzle about how to connect nine dots with only four line segments.  I HATE puzzles like that.  They are hard.  I couldn’t believe they expected a third grader to solve it.  Granted, I’ve never been a natural at math, but I’ve always done fairly fine with it.  I’m ashamed to admit, I couldn’t figure it out actually.  It was one of those puzzles that when you see the answer you think . . . oh how easy!  But if you don’t have the answer, finding it is really difficult.  I actually am pretty sure we had that problem for extra credit in 10th grade geometry, but I can’t remember how we did it.  Ho hum.  What you don’t use you loose.