Queen of Science - 7 Counting and Lollipops

For brunch, Miles is making omelets, sausage, and toast. Camilla is responsible for making the coffee and preparing strawberries. Since they had such a wild morning, Camilla decided that the family will have strawberries with whipped cream as a treat. Even Fern gets to have mushed strawberries with whipped cream!

Sitting on the playmat in the kitchen, Fern is left to entertain herself. Since she basically ruined her only opportunity to make the website, she is trying to come up with a new plan. Maybe she can convince her parents to let her sleep alone again? That’s not going to happen anytime soon. Perhaps she can ask her grandma for help? No, that defeats the purpose of hiding the website from her parents. Eventually, Fern decides to save the website design for later. She will create the video lessons now while pretending to be drawing!

Fern grabs her art pad, markers, and crayons. Since Fern cannot use her parents’ video camera and draw on a whiteboard, she will make a flipbook for the lessons. For the first lesson, Fern will be teaching counting!

In Fern’s previous world, it was discovered from a series of psychological experiments that people have a higher retention rate of information when the information is presented like a story. This learning technique is called the “story method.” Originally, it was thought that the story method could only be used for memorization, but it was later shown to be helpful for learning simple concepts.

Fern has decided that she will use the story method to teach basic math concepts on Simply Explained. This way she gains popularity and reputation as an innovative educator without sacrificing her advantage of advanced science and technology.

The story that Fern chooses is based on a famous old commercial from her world. In this story, a little boy asks a series of animals how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop. Eventually, the boy asks a wise owl how many licks to the center of the lollipop. In response, the owl licks the candy three times and then bites the lollipop, eating the whole thing. After this, the owl tells the little boy that it takes three licks to get to the center.

On the first page of the lesson’s flipbook, Fern writes “How Many Licks: An Introduction of Counting.” In the background, she draws a little boy licking a lollipop. On the second page, the little boy is asking a cow, “How many licks to the center of a lollipop?” On the next page, the cow licks the lollipop and then says, “one.” One page four, the cow licks the lollipop and says, “two.” On the fifth page, the cow bites the lollipop and declares, “there are two licks to the center!” Unsatisfied, the little boy says, “No, cow! You didn’t get to the center of the lollipop!” On the following pages, this cycle repeats with a cat, dog, turtle, and sheep. Each animal licks the lollipop a different amount of times before eating the entire candy.

On page 26 of the flipbook, the little boy finally meets the wise owl. Asking the owl how many licks to the center of a lollipop, the little boy hands the bird a lollipop. Like the previous animals, the owl starts licking the candy and counting each lick out loud.

“One… Two…. Three…”

“Crunch”

The owl bites the lollipop and eats the candy whole. Turning to the little boy, it says, “There are three licks to the center of a lollipop!” Frustrated, the boy decides to give up and accept that he will never know how many licks there are to the center of a lollipop.

Fern finishes writing the lesson just in time for her parents to finish making brunch. Quickly flipping a few pages in, she starts making a scribble drawing of a fabulous rainbow unicorn dinosaur that is running through a flower meadow.

Acting cutesy, Fern stands up excitedly and tugs on her mom’s pants.

“stwabbewyy!”

Camilla gently smiles and picks up Fern, resting Fern on her hip.

“She’s definitely our child; she inherited our love of strawberries.”

Miles puffs up on his chest, “Of course! Little Fern is the best baby of them all!”

As Miles carries the food to the dining room, his eyes flash over to the drawing pad. Intrigued by many colors, he quickly sets the food on a table and picks up the drawing pad.

As Miles shows Camilla the unicorn dinosaur he excitedly says, “Darling, Fern is a genius artist! Look at this magnificent creature!”

“Wow! Her drawing looks like an actual animal and not a big blob! I’m going to post this on MyRoom and rub Fern’s genius into everyone’s face!”

Fern almost laughs at her mother’s desire to brag. Even distinguished professors want to make other people jealous and show off their children’s intelligence.

As Miles starts to look for other drawings, he flips through the previous art pad pages. Noticing this, Fern freezes and looks at him with big eyes.

Luckily Miles is easily distracted, and Fern left the couple pages before the dinosaur drawing blank. Otherwise, Miles would have seen the counting lesson!

“Shucks, it seems like Fern only drew the one picture.”

“Don’t get greedy! It’s amazing that she even drew this.”

Unbeknownst to the couple, they were extremely close to discovering that Fern is highly intelligent and way beyond her years in maturity.