For the Rest of Their Lives

Mateo is the 7-year-old boy across the street who is great friends with Madison and Ella, particularly Madison. I thought it would be nice to have him come here after school rather than have him go to his after-school care as usual, for the next couple of weeks until we move, so that the kids have as much time together as possible. So the bus dropped him off in front of our house after school.

And what do you think the boy wanted to do? School! That is, home school. He wanted me to teach him math, math that his class isn't learning yet. And handwriting, too, though we never got to the handwriting part.

I taught him multiple-digit subtraction. He got the concept right away. Because in his class they're learning to put the commas in the right place when naming numbers, so that they can read the units, tens, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions properly, I decided to combine the subtraction with that. I took him, to his intense satisfaction, into the BILLIONS -- he was subtracting 145,420,334,541 from 368,584,865,972. He thought this was way cool.

Then he wanted to learn borrowing. He thought that was really hard, but he wants me to teach him the same thing over and over every day until we leave, so he gets it.

Then he wanted me to teach him multiplication, because he's been hearing Madison say she's been doing it. Fortunately, he already knows how to count by 2's, 3's, 4's, and 5's, so he at least got the concept.

He wanted to work for well over an hour. It was intensely satisfying to me.

His dad had found out that he had off school next Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. I had offered to have him and his sister spend that day here if indeed they had off. So I gave Mateo the good news this afternoon.

He counted on his fingers. "That's 1-2-3-4-5 days that I have off. Great." Then a thought struck him. "Hey! No fair! Madison and Ella have off...like...for the rest of their lives."