Am I smarter Than An 8 Year Old?

I used to be quite smart. I did well in primary school, managed to get into a grammar school and all my grades at GCSE were at B or above. I'm not saying any of this to boast, however when you read all of that you would think that I would be smarter than my 8 year old daughter, well if you did think that then you would be wrong!!!

Even when Elise started at primary school I felt at a disadvantage, what I was being told that they were learning all sounded foreign to me, I didn't have a clue about phonics, let alone how to pronounce the sounds!! Even now when my 5 year old is learning certain diagraphs (I had to look up that word too), I have to ask my eldest daughter how it is really supposed to be said.

We are at the stage of primary school now when Elise comes home with homework on a regular basis. This includes both mathematics and literacy. Now I got an A* in maths so I always thought that I would have no trouble in helping my own child if they were to become stuck, wrong again.

Just last month she had a piece of maths homework that required her to use number lines, I am obviously just not down with the kids because my first thoughts were, "what's a number line?". In simple terms it is the way our kids work out how to add or subtract numbers, what happened to writing one number on top of the other and working out the sum?

My 8 year old also has a new set of spellings to learn every week but these spellings aren't just normal spellings, oh no each set of words are different types of words. For example last weeks words were homophones , anyone else left scratching their heads at that?

I honestly feel like I need to go back to school myself these days because there is no way that I am smarter than an 8 year old because I feel like my daughter is the one who is constantly teaching me things.

Do any of you feel the same as me, are you smarter than an 8 year old??

xxxx