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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 1, 2016)
-);<-:67:-/768):-6<6W^MUJMZ Teaching math by shopping, cooking, and eating By JENNIFER COLTON Grocery shopping, cooking meals and pre- paring plates are parts of a day every parents knows well. What you may not think about is how every one of those ac vi es can be a les- son in math. Education erable when it’s a pizza or a cake you’re cu ng up. And area? Make sure your bowls, pans, and plates can handle the recipe you’re using them for and that the pie fi lling will fi t in the crust. You can use circular foods to decide division and frac- ons. If you have eight people and one pizza, how many pieces do you need? What if you have two pizzas but three people want the cheese and four people want pepperoni? QuanƟ Ɵ es, dollars and cents Before cooking or baking, you have to know how much you need. Since most ingre- dients are not sized for a specifi c recipe, kids can treat the ingredi- ents as a puzzle while they’re learning about addi on, subtrac on and division. If a recipe calls for four cups of fl our, you probably only need one bag of fl our. If it requires seven eggs, the half-dozen package won’t be enough. For teens, try fi guring out the quan - es needed if you doubled or modi- fi ed the recipe, then give kids a budget and see if they can purchase all the items they need. If not, what can they change? If there’s room to spare, is there anything they could buy to spice it up? If kids have cash and coins to pay with, they can try and fi gure out the best way to pay to cover what they need – a quick lesson in addi on and subtrac on while also bringing in frac ons and cri cal thinking. If you want a li le more of a challenge, try adding in coupons. Let kids divide sale items into a per-item cost and fi gure out the best deal. With those coupons, do they have enough for their bud- get? Bonus: Reading, science, history and culture FracƟ ons, measurements and volume For younger children, playing with measuring cups and mea- suring spoons can be a fun and educa onal ac vity. Help your kids understand how the measure- ments work (two half-cups make one cup or three teaspoons make a tablespoon). Instead of simply adding a cup of fl our, try adding three 1/3 cups or two half cups. When they’re ready, let them help with a recipe, seeing the diff erence between two cups of fl our and a cup of sugar or a quarter teaspoon of salt compared to a teaspoon of baking soda. You can also try a recipe like a pound cake where kids can see how diff erent a pound of each material looks (pound cake takes a pound each of fl our, bu er, eggs and sugar) while s ll weigh- ing the same. Baking is perfect for teaching frac ons – and it’s even a good lesson if they mess up on one of the measurements. Shapes, paƩ erns, and tessellaƟ ons Baking sugar cookies gives you the fl exibility to decide what shape those cookies will take. Help young children pick out the correct cookie cu ers to make squares, circles or triangles. Have older children cut squares into triangles and create tessella ons of alterna ng ingredi- ents to make a masterpiece on the plate, whether it’s sugar cookies with diff erent fros ngs, brown- ies and chocolate chip cookies or cantaloupe and watermelon. When looking at shapes and pa erns, you can have kids make pa erns on the plate or try cooking kebabs and having all the skewers match a pre- set pa ern. Area, radius and diameter For kids of all ages, words like radius and diameter can be ter- rifying – and confusing. Learning circumference is much more tol- This one is chea ng a bit in an ar cle about math, but the benefi ts of preparing food go beyond arith- me c. In order to cook eff ec vely, children must be able to read the recipe. For younger children, this can mean recognizing simple words like “egg” or “milk,” and for older children and teens, reading a complete recipe requires following direc ons, some cri cal thinking and ordering, understanding what it means to read all the steps fi rst and to understand the order events must happen in. For science, chil- dren can watch ingredients change state before their eyes, from liquid to gas and solid to liquid. They can see chemical reac ons as bread rises or water boils. Cooking can even be a lesson in history or other cultures as you tell the stories behind the recipe and the role it played. ________ Jennifer Colton is news director of KOHU and KQFM, and mother of three, based in Pendleton.