Cooking Up Fractions!
Growing up, these were some of my favourite cookies. Not only do they look super cool, but they taste great too. As a mother and teacher, they’ve grown in my esteem. Now I see their potential for teaching an important mathematical concept that many struggle with: fractions.
Whether you use the Refrigerator Box Cookie recipe from the Five Roses Cookbook or another favourite recipe you can easily die different colours, cookies can be a fun way to start (and consolidate) learning about fractions.
These pictures show us playing with the concepts of wholes, halves, and quarters.
With square cookies like these you can work on other mathematical concepts like angles. Right and straight angles are evident in all these variation. We tried, though didn’t quite master, obtuse and acute ones, but we had a lot of fun trying and manipulating the dough allowed us to easily restart and try again when our predictions didn’t work out.
Not able to actual make these in your classroom or home? Consider having your students or children play with playdough. The manipulation of the medium is important for students to try, fail, and try again and again until they are successful. You could even use playdough as a formative task with the cookie making as a way to celebrate learning or the summative task!
Don’t forget that dough shifts as it bakes. This too is an important element that students should reflect on and can prepare students for future STEAM projects.
Questions like:
How will the ingredients (materials) react to heat, pressure, friction…?
What tools can we use to measure accurately? How can we be sure we’ll end up with straight lines?
How do certain materials lend themselves better (or worse) to being measured, cut, heated, bound together…?
Does one colour shift more than another once the cookies are cooked?
can help students and children begin to think about structures, mediums, reactions, measurements…
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