Igniting your Child's Interests by Exploring Your Own

As homeschooling parents, it is important to stay interested and excited about the world too. By keeping up our interests, we may inspire our children or learn something that may interest them. Today, my find came from The Know-It-All.

Have you ever heard of a gnomon? I had not, but in learning about it the whole idea of square roots suddenly made sense. Interestingly, DD is working with square roots in her math – not the simple kind but some of the more advanced which include variables and rational and irrational numbers, but I thought she too would find this very interesting. He explains and illustrates the idea very simply using dots. If you can put evenly spaced dots representing each number, evenly such that you create a square, you have found a number which is a perfect square. The bottom row, or root, when counted is the square root of this number. Wow, that is amazing! Suddenly, strange mathematical terms made sense to the kids and to me.

Of course just like any other homeschooling home, this spurned us off into questions about the beginning of numbers and who created mathematics? I think truly we have discovered how curiosity killed the cat - - -he got so side tracked trying to satiate his curiosity, he forgot to stop and eat.