🍳 Kitchen Maths 🍳

By angerbda

These days with the children home, the morning is not as rushed as it used to be during school time, yet it is not as free and lazy as it is during a holiday.

Homeschooling the children is easier in the morning, getting them in a daily rhythm:

🍳Wake up, clean up, and pick your choice of clothes for the day;

🍳 Tidy up the bedroom, help daddy and mommy to clean up the house a bit;

🍳 Prepare the breakfast with all the family;

🍳 Start the lessons for the day/morning.

All those morning chores, as essential as they are, are also part of homeschooling. Learning household skills and participating in the chores with the family is a great time for bonding and getting a sense of responsibility. There is no age for a child to participate in these tasks.

Any of these activities pre-morning lessons can be turned into lessons themselves. The easiest to use, as a parent, to transmit some practical lesson, is cooking.

Measuring ingredients, reading a recipe, following instructions... all of these sound just like Kitchen Maths.

To transform breakfast into the first lesson of the day, take an easy recipe the children will like to prepare. In the following example, imagine two early primary kids just enjoying their cupcakes... and want to see a fast result with their cooking. The following recipe is easy to follow at any age, does not contain egg, and does not involve using the oven. Two minutes of cooking time in the microwave, and breakfast is ready!

🍪Brownie in a Mug - Microwave Recipe 🍪

🍪Ingredients🍪
¼ cup all­purpose flour (30g)
¼ cup light brown sugar (50g)
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
¼ cup milk (60ml)
Chocolate chips, to serve.

🍪Instructions🍪
1. First, in a mug add the all­purpose flour, light brown sugar, and unsweetened cocoa powder and whisk until homogeneous. Make sure there are no cocoa lumps.
2. Add melted unsalted butter and milk into (1). And stir until homogeneously mixed. The chocolate batter smells already so good.
3. Clean the rim a little and microwave for 1 minute. The oven is set to 800 watts and my brownie doesn't explode. Check the power of your microwave oven, and if yours is stronger, microwave for 30 seconds at a time. Then repeat microwaving for 10 seconds at a time until there is no fluid on the surface. It took 1 minute and 30 seconds today.
4. Arranging chocolate chips on top would be a great idea. Let cool little for about 20 minutes before serving.  

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How to transform the above recipe into a maths lesson?

Depending on the level of the child, it can range from simple addition to calculating fractions. Ask questions, push their limit and see how they react. Then you can help them find the results of those questions...

🍳 For a young child, you can ask, for example, how much of each ingredient will be necessary to make a mug-cake for each person in the family. Have them adding the number of times they use the measuring cup for each of the individual mug-cakes.

🍳 For an older child, learning fraction, you can ask them which measuring cup they will use if they prepare a mix for 4 or 6 cups, for example. Will they use 4 or 6 times the ¼ cup, or will they use another measure? Or ask them how much they would fill in a 1 cup measure to make two of those mug-cakes... Play around the measuring cups as an introduction of fractions.

🍳 For an even older kid, you can work about conversions: how much a cup gives in term of millilitres or grams—volume is easier to handle when working conversion, though, as mass will vary based on the type of ingredients. The recipe has a mass equivalent, however, that can be used for conversion if required.

You don't have to cover all the bases in the same morning cooking session. You can use the recipe every morning or so and introduce some more calculating fun.

Any type of breakfast could work. Prepare the mix for pancakes and check how much you can make using the same volume but a smaller spoon, or make scrambled eggs and ask the kids to define their own recipe with how much of each ingredient would be required for two servings or three, or six...

The children will most likely be receptive, they usually like to do things that are not labelled "School" or "Lesson". Homeschooling is not as much about sitting the children around a table with a worksheet, but rather learning essential skills in a practical way.

Use anything, any meal to learn. Cut the pizza and review trigonometry. Basically, learn how to cut in 3, in six, in twelve... talk about angles, sine and cosine... just by using the pizza cutter...

Learn time tables by splitting equally the French fries, stick by stick, between everyone—this can get tedious, though—or by distributing evenly pieces of chocolates or sweets for dessert...

🍳 Other Resources 🍳

Printable: pizza game to learn fractions

Printable: another pizza game to learn fractions

Printable: pizza bingo

Printable: Measurements worksheet

Recipe: Recipes kids can make on Food Network

Recipe: Ask your kids' help in the kitchen