She gets it from her grandpa

Every once in awhile, Kathryn makes me smile by the things she notices in her grade one math homework. Before Christmas one of her assignments was to choose a number between 30 and 100 and then tell two ways that it was different from 50. Her first observation was an obvious one, "31 is different from 50 because 50 is more than 31". She had to think for a bit. She started to count to 31 in every way that she could think of. Counting by twos didn't work, counting by fives didn't work and neither did counting by tens. Her conclusion "the only way to get to 31 is to count by ones".

The number 31

Today she noticed that she could make a new number sentence out of the answers from her addition questions. You can see that she has added the symbols on the last row of questions to complete the new number sentence.

5+3+3=11

She also noticed that the first column of answers were counting by twos on the even numbers and that the second column is counting by twos on the odd numbers. A simple observation, but it's just the kind of thing she notices when it comes to numbers. I remember always enjoying math as a kid too, I still enjoy a good number puzzle over any word puzzle. I'll have to get her some beginner number puzzle books.