Before my children were school-age, I tried to find fun ways to introduce math to them on their levels. As many parents, I worked with them counting toys, toes, fingers, snacks, and so forth. This began what I hoped would become a love for numbers and math. I also let my small children help in the kitchen by dumping ingredients into mixing bowls when I was cooking. We would count ingredients.
When my children got to school age, we began counting higher. We would count trees, flowers, dogs, cats, cars that we saw as we walked or drove somewhere. We also began adding things together. “If I have two apples and there are five people who want apples, how many more do we need?” It started by counting from two to five. It evolved to number problem solving. As my children have moved through math at school incorporating addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, we have played with recipes. In our household, we often doubled recipes so that we were sure to have enough for dinner one night and lunch the following day.
Recipes and Measurements
Doubling recipes makes for constant math because we need to remember every time that we look at the recipe that it will be doubled. Sometimes we need to cut large recipes in half. Sometimes I have played with the terms “dozen” and “baker’s dozen” so that I can tell children stories about how “baker’s dozens” developed and we can play with cookie and roll recipes. As my children have reached 10 and 11 years old, I have enjoyed teaching them about unit conversions, simplifying, and fractions in recipes. They now follow recipes with little input from me. My mother tried to teach me these same skills when I was young. I could not remember that three teaspoons equals one tablespoon or that two tablespoons equals one ounce. I certainly could not figure out how many teaspoons equal a cup. I only learned that 8 tablespoons made ½ cup because of sticks of butter with measurement markings on them. I admit, I now enjoy throwing all this information at my children even though they might remember only as clearly as I remembered at their age. Now that I am an adult, I remember my mother sharing this information with me and it stays in my mind longer and more easily. It also helps that I now use the information regularly.
Crunching the Numbers
I also enjoy using math when grocery shopping with the kids. We will look at serving sizes or the number of items in a package and discuss how many packages we need in order to feed the family for two meals. We also like to discuss how many pieces of something each person may have to divide a meal evenly. There are times that we have extras. What do we do with the “remainders” after we have divided up a meal or a package? Does someone get extra? Do we figure out how to divide the extra servings evenly within the family?
