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Silver Lining: When something great comes out of something bad! I asked the children to describe their own silver lining during the Covid-19 crisis.

After working with coordinate grids and dilations over the last two weeks, I could think of no better way to take the children on a long awaited Spring Break then go to Oh the Places You Go--Where the Mathlete Families Would Have Traveled this Year.

I shared a story about Isaac Newton about what can happen during a shutdown. In 1665, Cambridge University closed as the bubonic plague swept across England. Isaac Newton, a 22-year-old student, was forced to retreat to the family farm, Woolsthorpe Manor. Isolated there for more than a year, on his own he revolutionized the scientific and mathematical world.

After learning the wonders of chess and recording games with algebraic notation, the natural progression was to explore the origins of coordinate grid location. The coordinate grid of an horizontal x-axis and vertical y-axis in two dimensions was proposed by the French mathematician René Descartes (1596 - 1650). (Pronounced "day CART").