In the Oh Waily household we pretty much do some sort of formal maths each day.  And on any days that we don’t sit down at our books, we certainly discuss and do mental sums in our real life.
Yesterday and the day before we moved on to addition within 1000 for Miss Oh Waily.  This covered both the simple addition, where none of the numbers added up to more than 9, and also the regrouping of the ones column.

Miss Oh is pretty happy with addition in general, so I thought this would be a simple continuation of the addition we’ve done to date, but I decided to take the opportunity to do a lego-maths demonstration of the regrouping anyway.  This was mostly because she has a bit more difficulty with the subtraction equivalent and I wanted to re-inforce the concept of splitting numbers before we moved back to it next week.

Apart from the fact that both sections were a bit longer than usual Miss Oh got on as expected – no issues and no corrections that weren’t simply a case of briefly misplaced attention.  But over the dinner table, after we had finished eating, I decided to update Mr Oh Waily on her progress.  He did a great job of *wowing* and *awesomeing* her.  I could just see her puffing up as he spoke.
As part of the conversation I mentioned that she was not keen to do the workings on some of the equations, preferring to leave them horizontal and working from her memory rather than creating a column equation.  I had explained to her why it was useful to do this as the numbers became larger, but my Miss can be stubborn about things when she wants to be.
Mr Oh Waily took that as a bit of a challenge and decided to show her why it’s a good idea by giving her a much larger equation to do.  Naturally she struggled when she tried to do it horizontally – losing track of what she was doing – but as you can see from my rather scruffy photograph below when it was re-written in a column-style it proved to be no problem at all.

While I knew she was comfortable using the mechanism of adding I thought, perhaps, the size of the numbers might be a bit of a mental put off.  To be honest, seeing her do this blew both her Dad and I away a little.  (Remember she’s not 7 until August.)
So after we stopped going *wow* at her, she chose to write up some of her own 4 digit addition equations and proceeded to do those.  And the fact that she did pretty well with those inspired Mr Oh Waily to go the whole hog and he wrote out a really silly equation for her to do.  And she did it, even with a bit of self-correction mid-way through.

It is so wonderful seeing that a concept has been grasped and is able to be applied in unexpected situations – the biggest numbers we were doing yesterday and the day before were 3 digit long!  We will continue with our work on this, since My Pals Are Here! work in cycles so that concepts are repeated in sections but with increasing difficulty (or number size) so it will be helpful for Miss Oh to identify place values and so on.

It was rather a remarkable night.