Holes and haves

I took ten strawberries out of the fridge and washed them. Elizabeth saw me do this and quickly calculated (don't ask me how) that four people cannot easily share ten strawberries. She then told me that I need to pull out two more strawberries -- that way we can each eat three strawberries.

How many preschoolers do you know can do this?

I was thinking at first that the girls will eat two strawberries each, and then my husband and I will eat three each. But instead I decided that this will become a quick lesson in division. I asked her how many half-strawberries are on the cutting board -- she quickly told me there are twenty. Then I asked her how we would apportion twenty strawberry-halves into four bowls. She drew twenty half-circles representing the twenty half-strawberries, and then eyeballed that the answer would be five halves. Then we looked at the five halves and rearranged them to look like wholes -- how many wholes and halves are there when we have five halves? She answered two and a half. So now we went back to the strawberries. I gave her four bowls, cut two strawberries in half, and asked her to put equal amounts of strawberries into each bowl. Just as you'd expect, she put two and a half strawberries into each bowl.

Yes, I'm just a teensy bit proud of my little genius.