math for lunch
Nora was eating cheese and crackers today while I made her lunch. She picked up one of the crackers, snapped it in half along the diagonal, and exclaimed, “daddy! 2 triangles!” and made me go look at them. I showed her the right angles and tried to explain a little bit about the lengths of the three sides. I appreciate that she doesn’t get a lot of this stuff, but knowledge is cumulative and has to start somewhere. It was pretty cool.
So later we’re eating our lunches and she gets this excited look again and says, “The top of the cup is a circle!” and showed me with her fingers by tracing a circle in the air parallel to the top of the cup. I was blown away. I explained that if you take the intersecting plane out of parallel with the table top then the slice it makes in the cup is an ellipse rather than a circle. She nodded and said, “and the cup has MILK!” and then she poured the milk all over herself.