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.