Star Wars Math

Colwyn is always full of surprises. The other day I got out the counting bears to do a bit of low-key, fun math. There are four different colors of bears (red, blue, yellow, and green) and three different sizes of each color, so you can do lots of different things with them. He didn't seem very interested at first, but as soon as I started naming the bears after Star Wars characters, he really got into it. What I wanted him to do was just sort by size, so we created three spots for big, medium, and small bears. I named the first big one Vader, then the medium one was Obi-Wan, and the small one was R2D2. Then I picked a medium one and we named it Luke, then put it with the other medium bear. The next bear was a small one, and I tried to name it Jabba. Well, Colwyn refused, insisting that if we were going to name one Jabba, it had to be a big bear. Of course. :) We went through all the Star Wars characters they know, first deciding which size bear they should be, then putting them into the right pile.

I'm not saying that it's unusual that he can compare sizes of characters on TV and apply that to counting bears (at least, I don't think it's unusual), but it was really cute and funny how he insisted on doing that himself.