Math Games and Naval Ships

One afternoon a while ago, my 5 year old son C wanted to spend some time with me. He usually asks my wife to play if she is free unless it is something she is not interested in or cannot do. When he asks me to hang out, I usually say yes because it is a special time!

C wanted to just sit down and do some math games with me on the couch. We sat there for a few minutes and cut some shapes like the Fruit Ninja game to see who would get the high score. He knew some tricks that he taught me, so after that, I would get the high scores mostly (because I am a video game master). After playing a while, he wanted to do something different.

There is an app called Epic that my wife downloaded on their tablets. It has all kinds of videos and books in it. Most of the content is educational, but they have a lot of silly things in there too that are cartoon-like. We ask the kids not to watch too many videos or just flip through the books, but they have used the app so much that it’s now their default to just mess around in the app.

I wanted C to do something more purposeful, so I asked him to pick a book. He chose a book about naval ships because he is really interested in things used for war. I liked fighter planes and all kinds of similar things when I was a kid, so I get it. I just didn’t want him too exposed to the other side of those things too early, but we still spent time talking about ships.

He asked so many questions about what the ships were, how they moved, what parts of the ship we were seeing, and how they evolved over decades. It was all really interesting to him. We spent a lot of time talking about it and my hope is that it sparks some interest in him to build something in the future. C is creative in his own way and I can tell he loves to build things, so I loved spending the afternoon doing math games and talking about naval ships. They are interconnected if you want to end up building a real one some day!