Word of the day

One of the cool things about homeschooling is how much I get to learn. Today we did a math lesson, but reviewing the next lesson, I learned a new word. It's probably a word I learned way back when, but had certainly forgotten.

If it was a question on Jeopardy, I'd never have had a chance. Having been an engineer in my past life and being required to take YEARS of math in every shape and form, I'm surprised I didn't know this word. More surprising is my hubby (engineer too) didn't know this word.

The word is tesselate. Meaning: A tessellation (or tiling) is an arrangement of closed shapes that completely cover the plane without overlapping and without leaving gaps. When a tessellation uses only one shape, it’s called a pure tessellation.

Tesselations are something MC Escher was good at. Check out this site. Squares tesselate a space, but octagons do not. Who would've imagined that fish could tesselate.



My son is in Kindergarten. Seems like a pretty big word for Kindergarten, but I also think kids have an incredible capacity to understand stuff and adults don't always give them credit.

On the other hand, my son does manage to "misunderstand" a lot of things. I think he's being selective, especially when it comes to understanding when it's bed time.

But, on a positive note, despite being sick and out of commission for awhile, homeschool went on and we are almost done with this year's math course. We are using RightStart math and are on Lesson 74 of 77. Woo hoo!!! Almost done! We made it and my son is doing math pretty well for Kindergarten, tessellations and all.