Open-ended indeed

Riley received her first homework assignment yesterday. Kindergartners are to spend about 5-10 minutes a night on their homework, plus an additional 20 minutes of reading (or being read to, or both). Riley's teacher said she was starting off with some really open-ended assignments, which gives her an idea of how our children think and the various approaches they apply to a problem.

The first assignment: "Write down all of the numbers you know," with the rest of the paper blank (no lines).

Riley appears to think rather artistically (or haphazardly) about numbers. Her favorite number is 100, so there were a bunch of strings of 1's and 0's, then just random numbers between 1-100. The numbers started off quite large and then got smaller and smaller, then larger again, and then she started kind of fitting them together like a mosaic. The result looked kind of like those sand art bottles you make at the fair, where you pour different colors of sand in layers into an oddly-shaped bottle.

When I dropped her at her classroom today, I saw another student (or her parents) had drawn wide, neat lines on her paper and she had filled in consecutive numbers, starting with 1, in a relatively consistent size from top to bottom within the lines.

Both beautiful examples of hard work, both totally unique. I think Riley's teacher may be on to something here.