These past few days

.

1

I was with some third graders studying city wildlife Tuesday through Thursday and yesterday we all wrote poems about city wildlife. To prove to you that my improvved verse is always bad, and not just when it appears on my blog, I reproduce my contribution to the class effort here:

Deer & Duck

The deer jumped over my fence
to eat the apples on my tree.
He stood tall
and proud,
majestic.

The duck found the pond down the street
and stayed for weeks,
telling jokes
and hanging out,
giving me hellos.

I liked the duck and the deer.
Too bad the cougar ate them.

2

Today I was with second graders. During "Sharing" (ie, Show & Tell), one boy said to the girl sharing, "Can I come over to your house and play with your toys and smell them?

3

What the teacher said

When I arrived this morning, the kids' regular teacher was there getting some things ready for me. She warned me of her students thusly:

"Some of these parents don't know how to say no to their kids because they have too many of them [kids]."

I don't even know where to start with that statement.

4

Part of today's plan was to watch The Wizard of Oz (1939) and fill out a worksheet regarding it.

Now, I hate that movie. I have for years. But today I was thoroughly entertained all the same. And the kids loved it, laughing and squealing and screaming--even through the sepia scenes. I was amazed.

5

Five is the third smallest prime number, after 2 and 3, and before 7. Because it can be written as 2^(2^1)+1, five is classified as a Fermat prime. 5 is the third Sophie Germain prime, the first safe prime, and the third Mersenne prime exponent. Five is the first Wilson prime and the third factorial prime, also an alternating factorial. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes.

The number 5 is the 5th Fibonacci number, being 2 plus 3. 5 is also a Pell number and a Markov number, appearing in solutions to the Markov Diophantine equation. Whereas 5 is unique in the Fibonacci sequence, in the Perrin sequence 5 is both the fifth and sixth Perrin numbers.

Five is the second Sierpinski number of the first kind, and can be written as S2=(2^2)+1

Five is a factor of 10, so vulgar fractions with 5 in the denominator do not yield infinite decimal expansions, unlike most other primes. When written in the decimal system, all multiples of 5 will end in either 5 or 0.

Go Five!