In between visits to potential new homes, we stopped by our local Panera. As we had half an hour to kill – and munching on cookies takes mere seconds with my kiddos – we had to draw out the “experience”. Why not use our cookies and drink as an opportunity to practice fractions! I was impressed with how fast the kids (especially my youngest preschooler) learned the different values. In one or two practice runs, they were all able to differentiate between the different sizes of cookie bits.
All you need to do is get a knife and begin cutting. If my oldest were just a bit more comfortable with fractions and cutting, I’d let her do the cutting as a way to reinforce her knowledge. Alas, I did the cutting today.
Questions to ask:
- Which piece is bigger?
- How many halves make up a whole cookie?
- Would you rather have a sixth? or a fourth?
- Which size has the most m&ms? Can you guess without counting? How did you know it had more?
- If we eat 1/4th of the cookie, how much is left?
Looking for other math activities to help your kids learn? Here are a bunch of our previous posts:
- Long Division Made Easy – for those of us who forget how to do long division, reading this post is a must before our kids start that lesson in school.
- Our favorite collection of free online math games – for summer school! So your kids don’t forget all the concepts they learned over the year!
- Looking for something more basic? Check out our Lego Math activities or our Play with Math and Play Doh. Both are huge hits with our crew.