Got Cookies?

There are so many authentic opportunities for math in the kitchen, and you would be amazed at what young mathematicians can figure out! I turned my daughter's cookie swap into a 3 Act Math Task for second graders after I heard her exclaim, "It only made half as many cookies as it was supposed to!" The second graders watched a short video of my daughter baking (Act 1) , and together we generated our own questions that could be answered using our "math brains." Then I gave them a little more information that they needed to answer their questions (Act 2) Before we knew it they were using addition or multiplication to figure out how many cookies were in 3 rows of 5, doubling 24 (that picture only shows some of the cookies!) to find out how many cookies the recipe was supposed to make, and dividing 24 by 4 to figure out how many cookies each person in my family could get! In Act 3, we saw pictures of the actual cookies and confirmed the answers to our questions. Look for ways to use math and develop number sense in your kitchen!