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Friday, January 18, 2008

Are You Smarter Than a Fourth-Grader?

Suppertime routine: Our daughters get out all their school papers--art projects, graded homework, permission slips needing signatures, etc.--and place them on the table for Susan and me to look through and discuss while we eat. It's a pretty good way to keep up on what the girls are studying, how their grades are coming along, what activities are coming up in school, what's happening with other kids at school that we ought to know about (best friends, bullies, potential boyfriends, etc.), how they feel about school and their teachers, what we should help them study before the next test, and so on.

Tonight I got to read a brief paragraph titled "Saturday" written by Hillary (first grade). It's a fine paragraph that displays her ever-improving penmanship and spelling . . . as well as words that she has not yet learned. Can you tell what word she means by the as-it-sounds spelling used twice in this paragraph?

Sat is not a scool day. I get to sleep in latter than yousuwull. I get to stay up than yousuwull. I play on Saturday a lot.

Suzanna brought home a geography sheet with a couple "critical thinking" questions. Faithful Readers, are you smarter than a fourth-grader? Can you answer these? Give it a fair shot (i.e., DON'T LOOK UP THE ANSWERS!):
  1. Someone standing on the Great Divide would see a very different view from what someone standing on the Northern Divide would see. Explain.
  2. Pretend you get into a boat on either the James or the Sheyenne River, but you don't know whether it is the James or the Sheyenne. Pretend you float in that boat all the way to the ocean. When you get to the ocean, you know which river you started out on. How do you know?

3 comments:

  1. I know, I know!!!!!!

    If you were on the Sheyenne River you would arrive in Harwood and there would be no reason to go any further because you could go visit the Zanders therefore you would never see the ocean except the ocean blue eyes of four lovely children and two very tired adults.

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  2. I have no idea.....I bet Suzanna knew didn't she!

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  3. I know the first one - The Great Divide runs North to South from Alaska down to Mexico and the Northern divide runs along most of the border between Canada and the US and has something to do with the which ocean the water drains in to.

    I have no idea about the second one, but I barely know MN geography so I don't think I should be responsible for North Dakota's (assuming those two rivers are in ND of course:)

    Hope you guys were lucky enough to miss the sub-zero temperatures. It was negative 22 degrees up at the cabin and that didn't include windchill = brrrr.

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