I wouldn’t have thought of introducing calculators to Antonia yet but it’s part of the math program we’re using, so we did it for the sake of completeness.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it turned out to be slower and less accurate than getting the answers by working them out on paper.  So I suppose there are skills being learned here!  Like remembering the string of characters you’re supposed to type into the machine and making sure that they were all registered.

It’s funny how these exercises often don’t develop the skills they nominally appear to be developing – though I wasn’t sure till now, what skills calculators do develop.  We also did a bit of map work with grid referencing.  Finding the references was easy.  The observation skills needed to find the objects we were supposed to be referencing in a small map… not so much.