Kids love to be in the kitchen. They love being with you, being hands-on, and learning. Cooking and baking in the kitchen is the perfect place to incorporate homeschool math. Whenever we struggle to learn something or need to work on a skill a little more, we go to the kitchen or the grocery store, both places are full of numbers.
Homeschool Math in the Kitchen
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Basic Counting
Being in the kitchen with younger kids can be overwhelming. They are reaching for things, they want to help but have no idea what to do. It’s fun! And after years of practicing with you, they make muffins and cupcakes on their own.
But it all starts with counting in the kitchen. They count as someone adds in ingredients whether you are adding them or they are, or another sibling is.
Fractions Made Simple
What are you using when you bake? Measuring spoons and measuring cups. All of which are pieces of a whole, a whole cup, or 1/3 of a cup. Fractions were never my strong suit, I still hate when they come up in my kids’ lessons. But I’ll bake any day and fractions are less scary when there is food involved.
Reduce or Double Batch
When your kids are confident in the kitchen change things up and really challenge them. Get them to make a double batch of a favorite muffin recipe. This is great practice for addition, fractions, and multiplication.
Or maybe you don’t need a full batch of cookies for whatever reason and you want your kids to instead make half a batch of cookies.
Weight VS Volume
There are some recipes that use weight instead of volume. Or give both. This is a great time to measure and weigh ingredients. How much does one cup of flour weigh?
You can buy a kitchen scale almost anywhere and it’s perfect for leaving baking and exploring weight in general.
Grocery Budget
Getting in the kitchen and learning to cook and bake, and being confident there is a life skill in itself, but let’s go a step farther and add another life skill, grocery budgeting.
Let your kids plan a meal within a certain budget, this takes homeschool math beyond the kitchen and into the grocery store. Expand the activity and have them do a cost analysis on two different meals. Which one is cheaper when considering serving size?