Whaiāipo spontaneously held a math lesson with the kids after kai tonight. He seemed keen to re-visit π. I encourage such lessons and I'm glad the kids didn't hesitate to focus rather than saying, "but I wanna watch the rest of the movie ..."

We don't expect the children to retain everything, but to be familiar with the workings of real life things, ie relating what whaiāipo was teaching them to everyday activities they know about.

Whaiāipo started off by giving tama 1 a triangle to work out the perimeter.

Then they started talking about volume!!! By this stage I'm on Skype to my brother in Auckland and then phoning my younger brother to see how mum is doing.

Tamāhine 1 tuned in to the lessons by this stage though if I recall.

I think whaiāipo used a hot water cylinder as one of his examples for the kids to relate volume with ...

Shocking photo of the next one, but I don't expect anyone to double click to get a good look at the picture. The pictures are really only there for me to record what dad taught his kids tonight.

Anyway, they discussed circumference, diamater and radius. I can at least say that tama 1 remembered that π = 3.142 from whenever the last time whaiāipo spoke to him about such things. That was impressive to me that he could remember that!!!


And then to top off the lesson, he had the kids working out how many kilometres per hour they are going. The first hour they were travelling at 100 kph and the second hour they could only go 50kph. So in two hours, they travelled .... 150kms.

Tama 1 just asked whaiāipo if you can write kilometres per hour as "km/h".  Not bad.  I'm impressed with his working out.  I know he understands kph, but to ask about km/h I don't think I taught him that.  Jolly good.