“Are we There Yet?” Math

M knew that we had passed the McDonalds at Hamonasett, because he’d finished dinner.  He knew that was the half way point to MomMom and DadDad’s house, and he knew that it took 3 1/2 hours to get there from our house (ignoring the variables Daddy mentioned like rush hour traffic and accidents that M always does ignore and DH always does mention.)  And I knew that M knew all that stuff, because DH and I had told it to him over and over again.  But he really surprised me when he announced that we had 1 3/4 hours left to go as we passed the gas tanks at the Hamonasett rest stop, about to merge into traffic on rt 95 South.

So I asked him how he knew that.

"Well, we are half way there, and the trip is 3 and 1/2 hours, so we must have half of that left to go.  3 is an odd number, so half of 3 is half of 2 plus one half, so I took that part off of the 3 and one half, then I divided thehalf that was left in half, which is a quarter, and I stuck it back on the one and one half from the 3, and that gave me two piles of 1 and 3/4."  He said.

It sounds like the hours were a log he was sawing and moving pieces around visually.  It’s so fun to find out how he thinks!