Math Friday - A Subset of the Home School Week

Friday is Math day (and mother's day off). Following a spritely wake up, bath, eggs on toast and teeth, boy and step father proceeded to the world of subsets.

Choose one topic out of food, plants and people? Boy chooses food (no surprises there) and has a quizzical look on his face as if to say, “What has this got to do with maths and commerce."

The topic of the day is sets and subsets and with the help of a compass, ruler, calculator and quite a bit of mental arithmetic, boy determined that breads made up around 20% of all foodstuffs and milks made up around 2%. Boy suggested that whilst lollies do not make up the biggest percentage, they are the most important. Again, no surprises there!!

Step father mixed the math with a healthy dose of nutritional analysis (that Mum is much better at) and boy was able to contribute enthusiastically showing a good working knowledge of the food pyramid.

Given that breads and milks made up 22% of all foodstuffs (subsets of food), boy and step father proceeded to account for the other 78% using some fairly big assumptions as to the ratio between meats, fruits, sweets and other stuff.

Boy grasped entirely that once all the subsets had been accounted for, THERE WAS NO FOOD LEFT, and this made both teacher and student very sad.

Next up we divided boy’s life on earth so far into eleven full years and two part years, further use of the subset concept and just as an aside, worked out that he has been alive for 4133 days.

A solid effort: watch this space for next week’s commercial and chemical analysis of dry ice.

Photo courtersey of verzerk at stock.xchng