Measurement

Lately A. has been really into measurement, only without the units. She'll ask me whether she's taller than a hundred, or whether a billion is bigger than a giant. Or whether "a little bit of juice" means less than twenty. The other day she told me: "Mom, I love you as much as quintillion, but I only love T. as much as 5."

Interestingly, she made up her own units of time measurement, as in: "Is an hour like counting to 100 in the slow way or the fast way?" The slow way of counting seems to be roughly like counting seconds. But she hasn't really grasped seconds yet; the numbers make sense to her, but the units don't.

Another thing she does is, when you mention a number such as 15, she'll often say, "You mean 15 like in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15? That 15?"

It seems she is understanding numbers in some new concrete way, and that has coincided with her sudden interest in measurement, addition, and subtraction. I found some good suggestions on this page for helping young children understand units of measurement. (This list of ideas might be useful, too.) We'll be doing some of this stuff in the coming days. A. gets very frustrated when I can't answer questions like "How many is T.?" And I'm like "How many what? Inches? Pounds? Months?" She'll be happier if she can get a handle on units like these.

It's always amazing to me how a kid will hit a certain developmental phase and suddenly they just take off in one area, like walking, or letters, or math. If you try to push them to do a task before they've hit that milestone, it's like pulling teeth, whereas once they hit that point, good luck stopping them!