Math Monday::Snack Food Fractions
Here at freeplaylife, we’re not always down for math. But we’re always down for eating, so sometimes ya gots ta get a little snack math on up in the house!
To see our mathmatically awesome fraction fun in real time, we took a video of our antics. (Feed readers, I don’t know how to make it show up in the feed…any tips?!)
This Math Monday is inspired by our love of food, and our love of fractions, and our love of hiking. Tonight, we’re going to hike around Griffith Park, and we need some trail mix to keep us energized. So, here’s what we do to incorporate math and food…
We get out every snack food we have in the cupboard. Today it was an assortment of dried fruits, nuts, m&m’s, marshmallows, granola, pretzels, and popcorn.
We decide on the amount we want to make. Each person, today, wanted 2 cups worth of trail mix. Then we get out our measuring cups. To make it easy for the 6 year old, I stick with matching fractional measures, like 1 cup, 1/2 cup, and 1/4 cup. For older kids, you can mix in some 1/3′s to make it more of a challenge. Then, I set them loose on the ingredients, making sure to keep their recipe written down so we can repeat it if we like their blend.
Here’s Golfer’s recipe…he’s almost done!
The older kids can add up the fractions mentally, or just by looking at the fractions. For Sassy, I make a little chart of 1/4ths equaling 2 wholes. Then, everytime she measures out her ingredients, she can fill in the spaces and know how much more she has to go.
As you can tell, her recipe is very easy to follow:
And doesn’t it look delicious?!
By the end, we each have our totally unique blend of snack foods that make up some delicious trail mix!
2 Comments
This is awesome. Love the graphic recipe for your littlest one. I have a family friend, a teacher, who had to homeschool her son for medical reasons. I said something to her once about how, of course, she could homeschool. She was a teacher. She took me to the cupboard and showed me how she used cans to teach math. He went on to be a White House scholar, went to Harvard law and was an attorney at a large Wall Street firm.
love this idea! We've done granola recipes without fractions but now are at the age of fractions — I'll get on it!