If You Give a Girl a Grid...

...then the girl (newly seven) will want to make a game out of it.

When the girl makes a game out of it she'll be really busy for a few minutes and then make her Papa play the games.

When Papa plays the games, it will be interesting to see how the girl is thinking about math.

And when the girl thinks about math, she'll need a grid to go with it!

(But, in this case I didn't so much give it to her as let her find it and watch her co-opt it for her own uses, just like what happened with her 'divide even numbers' grid game a while back.  And, you do know that this story is jamming off the awesome If You Give a Mouse a Cookie stories by Laura Numeroff, right?)

The reason the grids were out to 'be discovered' is because I'm in the middle of fine tuning a paper quilt-ish activity for my summer arts programming in the city.  It's a really cool project, if I do say so myself, and I'll be sharing the concept and the student work when we're done with the week.  In the mean time, here's what my kid did within a ten minute period, all before 7:00 am, I might add:

The first game she made for her dad was a word search.  Apparently one of her babysitters brought a book of word searches with her one day.  Or something.  In any case, it stuck with her:

In the next game, the question was: "What is similar between geometry and arithmetic?" (Or something along those lines -- my recall is a bit fuzzy.  It was the crack of dawn, if you'll remember.)  If you're wondering what the answer is after looking over everything in the grid, it's that the 'equal' signs are also parallel lines.

In this game she asked her dad to 'make triangles out of a square.'  Hmmm....sounds familiar!  That big dot at the top of the grid is the starting point, she says.

And, finally, this game is a 'number search.'  You're supposed to find the hidden sequence of numerals that can be connected with one line (but not necessarily a straight one).  Hint: It's a sequence of six numerals. 

And that's what happens if you give a girl a grid -- not what you expected, but definitely entertaining!