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.