Ants with muscles
When my eldest child was in kindergarten, she loved to make art, but she detested the assignments that tried to make math fun by asking kids to draw. If I sat her down to complete one, she would stare rebelliously at her pencil or a strand of her hair rather than submit. Then one day, while drawing a group of five ants and a group of eight ants, my kindergartener started to sketch fast. She drew ants with bulbous limbs growing out of their bodies, like chains of sausages. “Bombombom!” she cried, flapping her arms up and down. “These are their muscles.” She continued to draw and mime pumping iron, giggling to herself, delighted to have planted something in her homework that couldn’t be accounted for in the metric of correct or incorrect. She had taken drawing back.