Why I love working on math with my kids

I love talking about math with my kids every day, but some days there’s an extra special treat.

Lately my younger son has been spending maybe 20 minutes each morning working on problems 11 through 15 on old AMC 8’s. The point isn’t to get good at contest math, but rather to just get a variety of interesting and challenging problems.

Today this one – problem 12 from 1992 – gave him a little trouble:

 

The full set of problems from 1992 are here:

The 1992 American Jr. High School Math Exam

So, he told me this problem gave him trouble and we decided to talk through it. It turned out that he really didn’t need any help, though, and listening to him talk through this problem is a great example of why I love working on math with my kids:

Kids have such great ways of expressing their ideas in math – it is so fun to hear those ideas as they work through challenging problems 🙂