Spencer

For Spencer's math class he was assigned to write 3 story problems. I think the assignment came at the end of last week and he had been thinking about it a lot, asking me some questions about it and adding details to ideas. He had decided early on that he wanted to make up a character named Jerry the Cat. He also decided early on that he wanted to do a play on  nursery rhymes. Well, like I said he continued to flush out his ideas and finally finished writing the problems last night. I'm a proud Mama! I just had to share them with you!

Obviously I haven't been able to read the other kid's story problems. Still, I  can't imagine them being as amazing as Spencer's! He could have taken the assignment and quickly written down some lame problems, but he put so much thought into it. Anyway, here's a copy of what he wrote:

Jerry the Cat was going to work one day when he came across Jack and Jill’s house. He was very puzzled when he saw Jill going up the hill. She explained that she was taking over Jack’s job of fetching the water because Jack has had a severe headache ever since he fell down the hill. Jill was confused because Jack told her to get 2 pints of water, but the pale went up to 5 cups. It didn’t say anything about pints. Jerry the Cat told her that a pint is two times as big as a cup. He told her that if she multiplied the number of pints you need by 2 then you get the number in cups. By doing that they figured out she needed 4 cups of water. She quickly put 4 cups of water in the pale and went back down the hill.

Jerry the Cat also passed Wolf and Pigs Deconstruction Company. Mr. Wolf was making a billboard. It read, “HAY and STICK HOUSES only $100.” The problem was he didn’t know what to charge for blowing down brick houses. He figured it was 4 times harder to blow down a brick house than it was for one hay or one stick house. To help Mr. Wolf, Jerry the Cat told him just to be safe to use proportion to get the price of the brick house based on the price of blowing down stick and hay houses. Mr. Wolf brought out a fan for blowing the houses down. He built the hay house then placed the fan on the first setting. The hay house blew away quickly. The same thing happened for the stick house. To blow down the brick house the fan had to be placed on the setting of 5 to blow it down. Mr. Wolf decided it should cost 5 times more to destroy brick houses than both the hay and stick houses. So he multiplied 5 times $100 to get $500, which was the price of blowing down the brick houses.

After that Jerry the Cat saw his friend March Hare who was running late for his appointment with the Queen of Hearts (as usual.) He did not know why he was always late until he realized that when going down the rabbit hole it became a different time zone. In fact there was 1 hour and 40 minute difference. March Hare needed to set his alarm clock 1 hour and 40 minutes sooner, but he wasn’t sure when that would be. So Jerry the Cat asked him when he usually wakes up. March Hare told him he always gets up at 7:30 so they had to subtract 1 hour and 40 minutes from that time. They said 1 hour earlier was 6:30, but they still needed to subtract 40 minutes from that. They realized after they subtracted 30 more minutes that they were still 10 minutes off. So Jerry the Cat said, “6:00 minus 10 minutes equals 5:50.” Then a very appreciative rabbit started to hop away while Jerry the Cat headed to work. He also figured out a way to get to work on time, which was to stop taking this route.

I love my smart and creative Red Head!