Wet Start

 It was a wet start to the day. The overnight rain was still pounding down as Ellie was dropped off. It did, however, die down, and by the time we took Ellie to school, the rain had stopped. Before heading off to school, Ellie had demanded that she should do some maths with Grandpa. Long may this continue. We talked about "number sentences" and their inverses. This meant that for any simple sum of "a plus b equals c", you could express it as "b plus a equals c", "c minus b equals a", and "c minus a equals b". This got me thinking. Could I introduce the idea of an "unknown" represented by "x". Well, yes, I could. She grasped it immediately and, in so doing, moved from arithmetic to algebra.

Having dropped Ellie at school, we headed home for some breakfast.  Diane then got on with some cleaning while I spent a little while on Ellie's project. I wanted to ensure the construction would work the way I had planned. The glue was a little slower to set than planned, but the idea looked sound.

Most of the afternoon was spent buried in our books, except the time I spent with the spot cleaner, sorting out some stains on the carpet so kindly left by Jasper in the last day or two.