Renzo loves Maths!

A few weeks back, Daddy Chan and I decided to introduce a little more Maths concepts to Renzo. Frequent followers of Renzo's blog definitely know how much Renzo loves alphabets, but in fact, his interest in numbers is just as strong, or even stronger.

Renzo could recognize numbers and count from 1 to 10 when he was 1 year 4 months old. By now, he can count to 100, and understands the concept of hundreds and thousands. He loves to count 2 by 2 to 20, 5 by 5 to 50, and 10 by 10 to 100 in a speed that even I have a little difficulty following. And he has been doing simple addition by counting his fingers for a few months, and randomly, he will ask us 2-5 times a day the similar kind of question, "Mummy and Daddy, THREE plus FOUR equals, what number??"

So, we decided it's time to go a little deeper and teach Renzo how to do addition without counting his fingers. I have to say there's probably no hard-and-fast rule to teach besides practicing repeatedly. So I've bought a Maths sticker book, which Daddy Chan uses to teach Renzo his basic addition. Although Renzo loves the book and asks for it almost everyday, knowing how short children's attention span is, Daddy's home maths tuition wasn't that successful from beginning and all of us just resorted to a much slower pace until the recent two days, magically, we caught Renzo doing his own addition and here are some examples of what he told us:

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4
3 + 3 + 3 = 9
1 + 2 + 0 = 3
5 + 5 = 10
6 + 4 = 10
7 + 3 = 10
8 + 2 = 10
9 + 1 = 10
34 + 0 = 34

I am impressed that he doesn't need to rely much on finger counting, instead, he knows the answers by heart. And if you notice, there are some patterns here and he has somehow grasped the concept of "which 2 numbers add up to 10" and "any number plus zero equals the number", which are the emphasis of Daddy Chan's "home tuition" weeks ago, so our efforts didn't go down the drain, although he's still far from solving maths problems on his own, Renzo is definitely picking up slowly, but steadily!!