Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Gotta Getta Betta!
Ms 8 finally has her betta (Siamese Fighting Fish), after a few days' delay. We went to the pet shop last week, but the woman we spoke to advised us that we hadn't had our aquarium prepared for long enough, and it really needed to sit for longer before it would be healthy for the fish. So Ms 8 twiddled her thumbs impatiently for an extra five days, which incidentally also gave her the opportunity to save more money and give herself the option of choosing between the expensive Crowns and Deltas and the less expensive, "no-frills" (pardon the pun) kind. In the end, she fell in love with the colours of one of the less-expensive ones, so she had more money to put towards buying dog toys for the dog's "birthday" next weekend.
In the process, we've had an interesting discussion about percentages. We have a VIP customer keyring token which give us 10% off all our purchases at our favourite pet shop, and during our visit last week, they gave us another one. Since then we've spent a long time exploring how percentages work. As ever, Ms 8 is very creative when it comes to finding ways to maximise her money...but alas, this time her schemes came to naught. For example, even if we use both our tags on the one purchase, we don't end up getting 20% off, and if we split the purchase between the two of us and each use one tag, we don't get any more off either *g* But we've also worked out what 10% of various amounts is, and I've explained the process of moving the decimal place. We sat down and calculated how much she could actually buy for the money she had if we factored in the discount beforehand. She was quite pleased to discover that it added up to a whole smoked pig's ear for the dog *g*
Having her own money to spend and plan for has been the major way Ms 8 has learnt about addition and subtraction, and she's beginning to explore multiplication and division as well. Now I can add percentages to the list of skills which she is acquiring through having a real, day-to-day reason to put them to use. Instead of using paper maths to arrive at a real, ingrained understanding of mathematical concepts (if she ever did - I didn't really get to that point in my own school career), she is acquiring the concepts first, and whenever she needs to, she will easily acquire the skills to translate that into writing.
