Zero = Nothing
I forgot to add one of her more surprising bits of knowledge.
She has a alphabet puzzle that Grandma and Grandpa Dahl gave her. Each letter has a picture underneath it (you pick up the Q, you see a quail). Her new game is to take all of the puzzle pieces and place them, one by one, on the matching letter (in the center, facing the same way) on her big alphabet mat on the floor. And woe to the person who tries to walk on the mat while she is doing this. When placing a piece herself, she carefully plots routes that won’t disturb already placed pieces. And she’ll walk carefully if she has to tread near a piece in place.
This mat also has the numbers zero through 9 at the bottom. The other day she was walking by the zero and she said ‘zero. nothing.’ I was impressed. Zero seems like a pretty tricky concept. But they do have counting/sorting work at school, where you place the appropriate number of ladybugs or sticks in the bin with a number on the bottom. So in the bin with a zero on the bottom, you wouldn’t put anything in. In the next bin with a 1 on the bottom, you’d put in one ladybug. And so on.