Mathematically speaking 

November 2005. LICM. With grandpa.

December 2005. Home.

Yiran’s math is unquestionably advanced, compared with most kids at her age. By the end of Kindergarten year, she was already adding and subtracting multiple digits with regrouping and renaming. Recently she has memorized the multiplication table (Chinese style, up to 9x9) with Grandpa’s help. Her mental math is getting faster and more accurate each day. Her teacher gives her special math homework and often asks her to help check other kids’ work. We seriously contemplated moving her up one grade but eventually decided to let her remain at her grade level – she is very smart but also very small, very social but also very susceptible. Furthermore, we’d like to see more tenacity in her when it comes to problem solving.

Her ability to read quantitative information is growing steadily. Nowadays she can read analog clocks accurately almost all the time.  She is also able to make sense of tables and schedules. Before she turned 6, she started to have a daily activity schedule which she developed modeling after Luran’s. When she couldn’t decide what to do next, she would run to her schedule to figure out. For a while, we were impressed by how fast she could read the schedule. Then we realized that she actually did not relate activities in the schedule with time—all she had been doing was to choose an activity (such as drawing, reading) from the schedule, haphazardly!