Creative Math

Jonathan's been reading The Sorcerer's Companion, a companion book to the Harry Potter books (which he has been devouring at the rate of one book per day--night, really--over the last week). For the past few days, he's been figuring out arithmancy charts for all of us, all of the pets, his Bionicle guys, etc. It entails ascribing each letter of a person's (or animal's, or toy's) name a value, adding the values in an arcane and labyrinthine way, reducing those addends, and then looking up the "meaning" in three different areas (social, heart, and character) to derive a personality sketch.

He's adding up these looooong strings of numbers and doing all of this math that's much more involved than anything we've done in our "lessons" and beyond that, he's enjoying it, doing it for hours on end, and, obviously, not complaining about it one bit.

So then I bought him this book, and he's in love with it.

I think I'm on to something, here.

Bionicles

Jonathan likes entering his Bionicle creations into contests on the Bionicle forum he visits, and also on the official LEGO website. He takes photos of them and submits them online. One of the latest tableaus:

I love the focus on the little guy, front center.

He also likes photographing the patterns that he makes with his math manipulatives:

He had to alter the bottom because he ran into the edge of the table

He works on these for sometimes hours at a time, arranging and rearranging them, trying to use up every block, experimenting with different kinds of symmetry. I love looking at them; they're so intricate.