A Whale of a Tale

Sarah stopped by earlier this afternoon to do the parts of her homework she didn't understand. She and her niece and a Brady Girl are now sitting on the back porch with construction paper and crayons, drawing and writing notes. I was about to ask if they wanted to put stuff in the composter, but I saw Brady Girl writing, "I love my brother and sister..." and I thought that was so cute I'll save the compost veggies for later.

One piece of Sarah's homework assignment produced an unexpected giggle. She had to read a bunch of short passages on various topics and answer different kinds of questions: some reading comprehension, some word problems, etc. Yes, they had some standardized-style bubbles as part of the mix, but mostly they weren't multiple-choice questions. Clearly this is part of third grade prep for the kids' first ISAT, though.

The passage that gave us a laugh was one about blue whales. It gave the conversion that one ton equals 2000 pounds and then explained that blue whales at different ages weigh different numbers of tons. The questions were to figure out how much the whales weighed in pounds at those ages. Sarah worked on the problems while I was cooking soup. At one point, she asked a question and I came back from chopping vegetables, looked at the line that said "a mature adult weighs 190 tons" and said, "What?!?"

Sarah and I cracked up at the idea an adult human would weigh 190 tons. In fact, Sarah laughed so hard she farted, and then we both laughed some more. Later she did the multiplication to find out that the mature adult whale weighs 380,000 pounds and we both cracked up all over again.

So right now we have two groups of girls drawing out on the back porch. Some of Jay-Z's girl cousins came by earlier, then went away and came back again. They take more supervision than the Brady kids do, although they now seem to have settled down and are drawing out on the porch while my soup cooks and I blog. Sarah and her best Brady Girl buddy finished their drawings and left. They doctored the note Brady Girl started and gave it to me:

From Sarah and Brady Girl
to Maritza

I love my little brother and my friends, including you.

Down at the bottom they have picture of Sarah, her niece and Brady Girl, featuring her spiffy new hairdo--she got those little twisties on the front part of her head that look kind of spiky before they hang down. So she had little triangles on her head.

Ok, gotta go. Now I have a new load of drawings for the refrigerator.