A - Z trick

My daughter Katie, when she was in high school invented a little game for her to practice her literacy and numeracy skills.

She memorized the alphabet and gave an amount to each letter,

ie,  A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 up to Z = 26

She would then be given a word and she would calculate in her head how much it added up to without the aid of the values of the letters in front of her.

For example, the word school would equal 72.

She would get the family to try to beat her but none of us could.  We even tried to beat her with a calculator but again we failed.

At the weekend she calculated a whole sentence.  She had to write the sentence down but the process was the same.  The sentence was We have been in isolation for nearly two months and she calculated this in One minute, 38 seconds.  She left high school eight years ago, and still remembers it to this day.

How amazing is this!

Author:   Trace Mann