 |
 |
make mothering.com your home page |
| shopping guide | ||
editorial columns
family tools
community features
 |
growing child  education |
Edible Equations
By A. J. Schmidt
"Finish eating your math and you can go out to play," I tell my kids. They chew up the last of their manipulatives before racing outside to enjoy the rest of the sunny day. My children have been gobbling up their math lessons for years. Instead of spending money on Cuisenaire Rods, flexible blocks, or tangrams, we buy snack foods that can double as math manipulatives before they get eaten.
When the kids were young, I browsed the cracker aisles at the market looking for interesting shapes. In addition to square, rectangular, and circular crackers, I managed to find ovals, triangles, hexagons, stars, and even spheres, cubes, and cones. The kids had fun learning to identify various shapes. And they realized that each shape could come in a wide variety of sizes, colors, textures, and tastes.
At the same time, they were learning to count. After all, those crackers need to be doled out equally, and counting is the best way to do that. When they were young, it seems, I spent most of my time in the kitchen counting out loud. Before every meal we had to count how many people were home; then we had to count out the correct number of plates, cups, and napkins that would be needed. When serving, we'd all count how many lima beans or spoonfuls of applesauce went on each plate.
When the kids were a few years older, pretzel sticks helped them count by twos, fives, and tens. Pretzel sticks work well because they can be secured together in groups of five or ten or, later, even 100, to reinforce the idea of place value.
Pretzels, cereals, and other snack foods are great for introducing kids to addition. Before they're very old, children know that two apple slices are preferable to one. They just need an adult to point out the mathematical equation of 1+1=2. And once they know that, it's easy to figure out that 1+2=3 is even better. When they want a new game, kids can take a pile of seven crackers, for example, and see how many combinations they can discover. At the age of five or six, some children are fascinated to see that 1+6 and 2+5 and 3+4 all equal 7. Addition may be interesting, but at our house subtraction is definitely the winner when food is involved. Once all those apple slices or pretzel sticks are counted out and added up, making them disappear, one by one, is the best part of the game. It's also a clear way to show the relationship between addition and subtraction. The children can easily see for themselves that 1+1=2 and, after an apple slice is eaten, that 2-1=1 again.
Older kids can use food to understand math, too. My third grader automatically got out a bowl of dry cereal while learning her multiplication tables. She could arrange small circles of cereal into three groups of four to find out how 3x4=12. Division, like multiplication, becomes easier with food. If we have 12 crackers to distribute evenly among four people, it's soon apparent that each person will get three crackers.
Snack foods help with the early concepts of shapes and counting, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Other foods work better with other mathematical ideas. Large foods are good for fractions. Apples and oranges, pizza and apple pie, sandwiches and chocolate brownies can all be cut into pieces of equal size. Kids discover that one pie can be divided into a variety of fractions and then recombined to still equal one pie.
Sandwiches also work well for understanding fractions. If you cut one sandwich in halves, another in quarters, and another in eighths, the kids can see the relationship between 1/2 and 2/4 and 4/8. (Don't let them get too busy investigating equivalencies, or the food will be too squishy to eat; I learned that the hard way.)
Any time food is involved, the kitchen can get messy. When the kids learn math concepts by playing with their food, we usually end up with bits of cereal and pretzels scattered all over the place. A layer of crumbs is minor, though, when compared to what my children have dubbed "Messy Math."
Messy Math is not an activity for the day after you clean house or the day before your in-laws visit, but it can be lots of fun when you're stuck inside because of winter storms or summer heat waves. Messy Math requires a variety of plastic measuring cups and spoons and a bowl of flour or water. (Using both at the same time results in Very Messy Math.) With the different cups and spoons, kids discover that four tablespoons fill a quarter cup and that four quarter-cups measure one full cup. Older kids can use glass measuring cups that have different scales written on the sides to find out how one cup compares to 8 ounces or 235 milliliters. Sometimes on a Messy Math afternoon we use all those measuring cups and spoons to actually create some cookies. After they've baked, it's easy to divide, multiply, add, and, especially, subtract them until they disappear.
Obviously, I rarely tell my kids not to play with their food. It's one of the main features of our math curriculum!
A. J. Schmidt mothers and homeschools her two children in rural Oregon. They all have fun learning new things, even when-maybe especially when-the process is messy or delicious.
Featured Product
Advertisement
