Mo' Math

Since we live in a city with infinite choices for activities and entertainment, Kevin suggested we try out a method we saw used this week at a school we visited for planning out our weekend.  Kevin actually uses this method at work.  At the school, they use this each morning with the kids to plan out their days.  It's called a Kanban board. 

Kanban is Chinese for signboard or billboard.  Many tech companies now use this method.  Basically, you take sticky notes to plan out your projects - in our case, our weekend - and move them around the board as you complete projects.  We all started by putting up what we wanted to accomplish this weekend.  Some of our To Dos didn't overlap and so didn't get done.  For example, I didn't get to go out for breakfast and Kevin never finished his book.  But as expected, we accomplished a lot more in two days than some families do all week.

Lincoln Center anxiously awaiting spring.

Kevin and Holden beat out the rain with an early morning jog around the reservoir on Saturday morning.  Holden saw that Kevin had "jogging" on his board and Holden quickly added "Go jogging with Kevin" to his board.  Very sweet.  Kevin says he made it all the way around with no complaints.

Once the rain started coming down, all four of us went to the parent-child yoga class - Kevin's first time at our yoga studio.

Kevin getting moral support from Holden

Once showered and dressed, we headed back out in the rain to the other side of the East River: Brooklyn.

I had read about this free concert that happens every Saturday at 3pm on an old coffee barge.  The barge is parked under the Brooklyn Bridge.  It's called Bargemusic.

As you can see, the interior walls are lined with beautiful wood and the acoustics are amazing.  They play classical/chamber music up to five times a week.  The Saturday afternoon concerts are free but the rest of the concerts in the evenings are $30 and up.  There are gorgeous views of lower Manhattan (which I'm sure are even more spectacular when it isn't pouring rain out).

This is how Holden kept entertained while the classical music played.

We wandered around Brooklyn a bit more in the rain and tried the world famous Grimaldi's pizza.

 

We got a lazier start to our Sunday morning than our Saturday morning.  Kevin and the kids played chess in preparation for a chess tournament that the kids are competing in this Friday.  And the kids played some online games and continued learning coding.

 

We moved a couple of our sticky notes to the Done column by trying out a new Ramen noodle house in Gramercy Park.  Ramen is a favorite of our family's and we're always trying to discover new and better places to try.  Terakawa Ramen was listed as one of the top 10 Ramen houses in NYC by the New York Times and didn't disappoint.

 

With full bellies we walked a couple blocks over to the Museum of Mathematics (or more affectionately referred to as MoMath), a place I've been wanting to take the kids for the last year.  If you've been to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, it's similar in that it has hands-on exhibits that the kids can touch and manipulate and play with, which makes it a lot more fun for them.  When trying to convert math into something you can touch, often you end up with geometry.  Holden thought the museum should have been called the Museum of Shapes.

While the kids had a lot of fun playing with all the exhibits, as soon as one of us or a staff member would start to explain the math behind the exhibit the kids' eyes would glaze over and they'd head to the next exhibit.  It may be a few years before they're really able to understand what they're playing with and why they're playing with it.

Riding bikes with square wheels on a bumpy surface makes for a smooth ride.  There's math behind that.