Teaching Math to a 10 year old With Cooking – Secrets they don’t teach you at school

10 year olds are busy bees! How do you get them to practice math at home? To be effective, one great way is for kids to practice math through hands’ on activities which gets their interest. At times, there must be some injection of fun and not so serious an environment to get them to understand math.

Math basics are essential and you will be surprised how our homes are equipped to ensure that our kids acquire those math fundamentals.


1 FRACTIONs

10 year olds need to learn a lot about fractions. From basic fractions that are with common denominator they will go on to learn uncommon denominators and the use of fractions in various math operations.

It was not easy for me when my son was just learning fractions. Drawing diagrams and using color just did not get it home with him. I sliced potatoes at first to show him what fractions meant.

Potatoes helped greatly and I also turned it into an art project! But potatoes did not help much when denominators and numerators differed and operations become complicated.

Cooking however is a very good method to teach fractions. How?

For simple fraction practice, simply follow a recipe.

For more advanced fraction, get your child to double or halve the recipe. Another practice is asking your child to figure out which measuring cups to use. For example, only make available a 1/4 cup measuring cup when baking a cake. Help your child figure out how many 1/4 cups go into each 1/2 and full cup. And so on.

Check my blog entry on Love Cookies to help with a quick recipe for giving your kids a lesson on fractions.

2 DECIMALS

Decimals is the other thing that 10 year olds need to learn. Teach decimals from basic fractions.

Children will also work with decimals with money. If you give your child an allowance, you may want to give slightly different amounts. Vary the practice. Ask your child to add the decimals or subtract.

You can also show your child how to compute the tip at restaurant, which will practice decimals.

Cooking is again an excellent method. Change the recipe to decimals. Give your child the measuring cups and so on and he will need to translate the decimals to fractions.

You can use the same principle for other math basics.

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Happy Cooking!

Teaching Math

I loved math when I was in school. Its practical and the answer come to you if you follow the steps and the rules. Math becomes a habit after some time.
Math must make sense to the kid. Math is about ‘how’ and ‘why’. And there’s a lot of this happening through our cooking experiences.

There must be an ultimate goal with Math; Kids must understand why they need it for afterwards. To navigate in this complex world. Math is about reasoning which is so important for later parts of their lives.

The tools used for math is numerous – through books, math exercises, math kits, games and so on.

Add cooking to your list.

To get our kids to love math, we must show it through our attitude and enthusiasm for math and how it solves problems.

I found that teaching maths through baking was easy and fun and prepared them for lessons at school. Baking teaches:
• Measuring
• Estimating
• Counting
• Size and shape

My younger son was about 3 when I got him into the kitchen with me. My elder boy started ‘cooking’ when he was 2. I would tend to work with them on measuring flour, sugar, milk and oil correctly. I hand them the cups and explain what is needed while reading the recipe. I would try to get them to read with me.

We also work on estimating because for some recipes I might add or take away certain ingredients, but I don’t use any form of measurement. So they learn to eyeball and look for the ingredient and know whether it’s too much or too little. Of course counting cookies and sorting decorations is just plain fun.

Hope this gives you some ideas for bringing education into your Christmas cookie baking this year.