Venn Diagrams anyone?

Ok, my first moment in my homeschooling career where I thought, uh-oh! I'm not going to be able to teach this !!!

I got a book out of the library called 'Hickory Dickory Math'. (teaches math using favorite nursery rhymes and fairy tales). Elizabeth looked through it and wanted to do the duck page really bad... It was all about Venn diagrams. What are those I thought?? Surely I could get it.. it was afterall a book for Kindergarten and grade one math.

After scratching my head and trying to figure it out for awhile, I thought I had things under control...

You are supposed to make 2 circles that overlap each other... And put yellow duckies in one, white duckies with spots in the other, and yellow duckies with spots in the middle.. Get it? LOL... the ones in the middle have to have the same characteristics of each of the overlapping circles...

So I tried to explain this to Elizabeth... and she just looked at me with this blank look. Uh-Oh!! Now what? I didn't want to look stupid, and I wasn't sure how these Venn diagrams were important in the real world, but I didn't want to just give up! I'm the teacher afterall :-)

I turned away for a minute to get the baby and when I came back Elizabeth had drawn spots on ALL the ducky's... (they had to match their mommy) and they now had eyelashes too :-) Hmmm... now how were we supposed to organize them into our nice little circles?

Then there was Z who was trying to climb on me and the baby who was spitting up on her freshly changed outfit... Yawn! Why did I get out of bed? Not a good start to the day- and it was only 8am (we got up at 6).

Finally, though, we figured it out, and amazingly enough she got it!! I rejoiced because I could barely figure it out... I actually taught her something, and in math to boot.

After this, I drew the picture to the left with just the hearts on the left and the striped shapes on the right and asked her to fill in the middle... and she did it without any help from me. HA! so I can do this afterall... (now someone remind me why venn diagrams are important?)