cool problems to make your kid do

Here's a cool kind of problem to introduce to your kids. This sort of problem is plentiful in the Drops In The Bucket series, and I don't recall seeing it when I was a kid, so at least one thing has gotten better.

It's genuinely an applicable class of problem, and it definitely helps reinforce the concepts of borrowing and carrying in elementary arithmetic. After you've done them for a while, if you're a really deep thinker, you might develop a deeper appreciation for the brains behind the place value system we use (and for the benefits of the metric system).

The problems look like this:

6 hours 15 minutes - 3 hours 36 minutes = ___

3 feet 5 inches + 3 feet 8 inches = ______

6 years 4 months 12 days - 2 years 9 months 15 days = _____

You get the idea. Life is rife with examples of problems like this. You can use quarts/pints/ounces, yards/feet, days/hours, punds/ounces, you name it. The kids will be borrowing and carrying weird quantities all over the place, and if they're like Ben it'll take some getting used to, but they will benefit from it.

And when they're good and sick of carrying 12 inches and borrowing 60 minutes, give them meters and decimeters, or centimeters and millimeters.

And then explain to them again what's going on when they carry and borrow in ordinary math. That should seem fairly easy by contrast, and they should feel privileged.


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