Cat Quotations

And now for something completely different…

The intrepid Quote Investigator played around with math recently:

“You know, people think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It’s the stuff we can understand. It’s cats that are complicated.”

—John Horton Conway

It reminded me of one of my favorite homeschooling exercises:

• I would write out a short paragraph, all lower-case with no punctuation (and usually including some misspellings and grammar errors) on a whiteboard.

• Then my children took turns marking the passage like editors correcting my work.

One of these exercises was a series of short quotations about cats, which my youngest daughter loved.

So in today’s post, I’ve put together an editing exercise you can share with your children, along with several links for playing with mathematical cats.

Enjoy!

Cat Quotations Workbook

This mini-workbook offers five pages of editing practice:

• Cat Quotes: Proofreading Practice with Purring Furballs

(No answers, since punctuation is flexible, and what’s right is often in the eye of the editor.)

If you need a handout of proofreader’s markup, Sharon Watson’s got you covered:

• Proofreading Marks Article with Practice Assignments
• Proofreading Marks Handout

Mathematical Cats

And here’s one of my favorite older playful math activity websites. Due to internet entropy, not everything still works, but there’s plenty to explore:

• Math Cats

And a few math puzzles featuring my own cats:

• The Wisdom of Cats
• Math Puzzle from the Ancient Kingdom of Cats
• Math Journals: Save the Cat!
• Playful Math Journaling with a Cat

And If You Have a Child Who Loves Cats

My daughter would have delighted in this workbook series, if it had come out when she was young. Absolutely adorable!

• Kitten Math by Kelli Pearson
  (affiliate link)