I Drew This

I was teaching Little Miss L the joy of Roman Numerals the other night. She’s 7 now, so after explaining the concept, she picked it up pretty well.

Once she got the hang of how they worked, she insisted that I give her a quiz on them. So I drew up a page with two columns and wrote some random numbers in the first column. Her job was to write the equivalent Roman numeral in column two.

She got a couple of the easy ones, like 8 and 11 but then she got to something like 37, and rendered that as III VII. You could see her brain working and things clicking into place as I explained how to do it properly. She then blitzed pretty much all the numbers under 100. I inlcuded my birth year, 1972 and had to hold her hand through that one but she did well.

One of the last ones was 309. It was the only number I’d given her with a zero in it. She asked me “How did they write zero?”

I said “there was no zero”.

After a second or two she asked in reply, “Well how did they blast off rocket ships?”