The Bolt

I was in the kitchen getting lunch ready, and she was in the living room. I kept hearing, "one... two... three... four..." and then at the end of her counting sequence she would stop. She counted from one to two, then one to four, then one to six... and so on, always increasing the end number by two each time.

I finally figured out that she was practicing addition. She started out with one plus one, and then two plus two, and so on. She was using her fingers to count, so for two plus two, she counted two fingers on her left hand and then two fingers on her right hand. I peeked in on her, and also noticed she had a pen and paper nearby.

When she hit six plus six, I thought she would have some trouble since each hand only had five fingers, but instead she just switched methods. Instead of counting on each hand, she would count on the same fingers in the same sequence, but she would do it twice in a row. So for six, she would count one through five on the left hand, six on the right hand, and then back to the left hand for seven through eleven, and finally end up with the result of twelve on the last finger.

I was enthralled with this, and listened quite closely to the counting and adding. I was wondering what would happen after she reached ten plus ten, since for sure then she would have run out of fingers, and even some new method at that point wasn't going to do her any good. So I waited past seven, eight, nine, ten..... and then I heard a small voice from the living room:

"Dad, is eleven plus eleven twenty-two?"

"Uh.... yes, yes it is."

Well. How in the world did she do that. Next was twelve, and same as eleven, she reached the answer but then called out for me to verify that she got it correct. Indeed, she did.

Finally when she asked me if thirteen plus thirteen was twenty-six, I wandered into the living room.

"How are you counting?" I asked.

"On my fingers, " she replied plainly.

"But, you can't count to thirteen. You only have ten fingers."

"Oh, I know. But I just pretend that I have three extra fingers, and I count them."

"Twice?"

"Yes."

She showed me where her three invisible fingers were. I laughed.

Then I looked down at her paper, and saw the work she had put into writing out the equations:

They were fairly neatly done, and she was obviously proud of being able to do the math (she had marked them all as correct). I noticed, however, that the smaller equations like two plus two were not written down, so I asked her why they were missing.

"I don't have to write the easy ones down, I just know them."

I hugged her and went back to the kitchen to finish making lunch. I was happy to continue to verify her results; she stopped at sixteen plus sixteen equals thirty-two. I figured that was pretty good work for a six year old.