Clever kids

Last night we had a funny experience walking down the street after dinner. I was walking ahead with Clara, and Oscar was talking (loudly and in English) while he danced in circles around Tanja. Among other things, he was talking about math. After he said "508 plus 508 is 1016" an elderly man stopped, and asked Tanja "What did he say"? Oscar repeated it to him, saying the numbers in German this time. The man was so astounded that he reached into his pocket and said "I don't know or care how much is in here, but I'm giving it all to you", and proceeded to offload a huge handful of change in Oscar's hands! He told us that he's never seen such a small child able to do that level of math, and that we should be very proud (we are, of course).

But the story is made even better by two events that happened earlier that day. The first was that on the way to school with Tanja, Oscar worked out that 8192+8192=16384. (He was interested in knowing what came next, because the day before I had gotten to an 8192 tile in the game 2048.) So on the scale of what Oscar is able to do, 508+508 is really not the hardest question.

The other thing is that yesterday we went to a celebration of Oscar's 100th day of school. During an event for the parents, one of the teachers asked all the kids what they've learned in their first hundred days, saying "for example, have you learned to count to 100?" Oscar put his hand up, and when she called on him he said "I've learned to count to 100". Tanja and I cracked up, because first time I heard Oscar count to 100 was when he was 3 or 4 years old. I was walking with him to pick up Clara from school (in Berlin), and he started counting and just didn't stop. When he got to 100, he counted by 100s to 1000, then by thousands to 30,000, at which point he decided that was high enough.


Clara has liked reading for a long time, but recently she's been tackling a few longer stories. For the last few weeks, she's had her nose in Harry Potter books. She finished the first and second, and was planning on holding off until next year to read the third. But it turned out that she was too curious to wait to find out what happens next, and over the last three days or so she's made it halfway through "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". We went to a party today where the kids were invited to dress up (it's nearly Karneval), and while Clara walked along with the book in her crossed arms I decided I needed a picture!