Inside the Mind

I would love to be able to see inside Sascha's mind. Last night in the car we were playing "math problem." The first one was something like, you have 10 jellybeans and give away 8 and then get 5 more from someone else, and how many do you have. Seven, she said. So then Matt gave her this one:

Say you have 20 jellybeans, and you want to share them among yourself and 3 friends so you each get the same number of jellybeans. How many jellybeans does each of you get?

Silence for a moment.

"I know, it's kind of a tough one," Matt says.

"No it isn't," says Sascha. "Five."

I about drove off the road.

After recovering, I asked how many they would each get if she had 16 jellybeans instead of 20. She couldn't get that one (she actually guessed 4, but then guessed 2 before we could say anything, so she was doing something along the right lines, but couldn't explain what she was doing), and then we used 8 instead of 16 and she said that was too hard. "I do better with bigger numbers," she said.

At home we got out some little stones and did the same problem in a more visual way, so she could physically divide up the stones among four people. She thought it was fun.