Using Cooking to Teach Your Children Math

If you're looking for hands-on ways to build your child's math skills, head to the kitchen. Math skills are important, and along with text books, manipulatives and games, I've developed a list of what I call "Math Lifestyle" activities. Cooking is at the top of my list. Along with math skills cooking also reinforces reading, science and of course independent living skills. Unlike worksheets, hands-on lessons in the kitchen provide nourishing and tasty rewards.

Math skills really add up in the kitchen because recipes are boiling over with math! There are numbers of servings, volume and weight measurements, temperatures, pan sizes, lengths of time, fractions and of course division when you half a recipe and multiplication when you double one.

My first cooking experiment at age seven was an advantageous one. I made cream puffs, or so I thought. One overwhelmingly salty bite and I quickly learned the difference between 1/2 cup of salt and 1/2 tablespoon of salt. A lesson learned with the sense of taste is not easily forgotten!

Even very young children can help in the kitchen. At ages two and three, my niece and son assisted me in making a pumpkin pie. Having all the ingredients and tools ready to use will help when working with youngsters who aren't great at waiting. For mixing, use the biggest bowl you've got so it is less likely to spill out. I teach kids to feel and hear the spoon on the bottom of the bowl as they stir. If the spoon is scraping the bottom of the bowl, the mixture is less likely to be flying. Young children may not understand fractions but they can understand which measuring cup/spoon has more or less and they always love to count eggs.

All in one crock pot recipes are another good place for children to begin cooking lessons. My eight year old daughter loves to make cinnamon applesauce in the crock pot to eat and to give as gifts. She learned that after cutting and coring eight apples, she ended up with one jar of applesauce. She quickly figured out that she would need sixteen apples to get two jars. I would love to tell you that she then learned that she could get three jars from twenty four apples but what she learned was that her hands were tired after coring and cutting up sixteen apples! That will have to be a lesson for another day.

Your local library will have several inspiring cookbooks for kids to help you get started like The Math Chef by Joan D'Amico Karen Drummond. This book has over sixty math activities and recipes for kids.

Try finding at least one time each week that your children can help you prepare a meal from start to finish and you'll be creating a math rich lifestyle. There are many simple ways your kids can help out and use their math skills at the same time.

* Teach them to set the oven to XXX degrees.

* Teach them to watch the time and alert you when a dish should be ready. (Of course, set the timer as a back up.)

* Teach them to find/use measuring spoons & cups.

* Ask them to cut food items (apples or pizza for just two examples) into X number of pieces.

*Ask them to read recipes for you and let you know how much you need of each ingredient.

*Ask them to measure your pans when a recipe calls for a certain size pan.

There's math involved in every breakfast, lunch and dinner. These are just a few examples but the more you involve your kids in cooking the more you'll notice the math opportunities in preparing each meal.

Cooking together is a fun, rewarding family activity and it always keeps math on the menu.