Venn diagrams

While we were in Tucson over Thanksgiving week, I introduced Sayer to a new book of logic puzzles. Venn diagrams. We've done analogies and perplexors and are now in the middle of the math perplexor book. This one is harder than the others have been. When I ordered it I saw that it was level A, but failed to note that there's a 'basic level' that comes first. We've done both the basic level and level A of the regular perplexors, and the basic level of grid perplexors, so we're pushing through in this book, but it is definitely one that requires my help where in the others she was able to complete a few of the puzzles entirely on her own. Ah well.

So, because I know this book is harder than the other ones have been and I don't want her to get frustrated or bored, I backed off on the number of puzzles we try to do in a day. Of course, at the same time that I did that, I also brought out the Venn diagrams book to see if she liked those any better.

She did.

After explaining the concept and showing her the first page I got chortles of 'this is EASY!' I told her she could do as many pages as she wanted. By that time she was already on page 6 or 7. She said maybe she could do 10. I agreed, and told her that I'd give her a quarter if she did. Her eyes got big and she got to work. When she finished 10 pages she said she might keep going. I told her that if she got to 20 then I would not give her the quarter for 10 pages, instead I'd give her a dollar for 20. Her eyes got bigger. :) Then she said maybe she could finish the whole book. I told her that if she did that I'd give her $5. I didn't know her eyes could get that big!

She got to page 14 and then her Aunt Jodi and cousin Dominic came home, and it was lunch time, and things got distracted ... so she got a quarter for the first 10 pages. And we're continuing to have fun working on them every day.