Snacking through the Math Standards
Many parents and early childhood educators are turning to online learning as they shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are many ways to meet your early math standards while engaging in everyday offline activities—if you know what to look for. Since we started out the month of April in the kitchen, let’s continue with the food theme and snack our way through some early math adventures!
To get started, grab a tray of fruits, veggies and maybe even a sandwich.
How will you use these food items to meet your early math standards? By matching and sorting! With this simple activity, we are looking at the ways that these food items are the same and the ways that they are different. We are also comparing and ordering sets. When we compare and contrast the characteristics that describe something, we call these attributes. This is math! When the children in my group engaged in this activity, they sorted by vegetable, but your group may sort by size or color.
Let your kiddos do the chopping, peeling and serving to build their fine-motor skills. They can tear, cut, stack, assemble, chop, stir, mash, grate and roll! Let them spread, sprinkle, measure and pour! Ask them to describe the taste of their snacks to build their vocabularies. Their food may be spicy, savory, creamy, delicious, fruity, sour or scrumptious!
Can they create an order or progression in a predictable way? That’s a PATTERN! Can they duplicate it, extend the pattern, repeat it? Can they create a figure by following your SEQUENCE? This is math!
Get creative! Give your children 5-10 pieces of fruits or vegetables and challenge them to create a figure. We don’t want to be wasteful, so only let the children use what they can eat. This activity helps build NUMBER SENSE!
RATIONAL COUNTING refers to a child’s ability to assign a number to each item in the collection.
ABSTRACTION is the principle that any set of objects that can be seen, touched, heard or imagined can be counted. This sounds so simple, but this is math. This is the foundation that we need to lay down before we can ask our little learners to do more than they are ready for. When you count with your child or children and they realize that the last number word represents the total number of objects in the set, that is CARDINALITY!
Keep it simple. Keep it fun. You can do this with snacks. You can do this at any mealtime. Extend the learning. Trust me, you are meeting the math standards for kindergarten readiness. Enjoy your time with your children and the math skills will follow!
“Snacking through the Math Standards”
This is sure a couple of great ways to learn and practice math with your children at home using food. As long as you do not waste any. The children are able to count, sort, and make pattern with their foods and that can become a lesson.
Snacking is a great way to do math with the children as they manipulate the food they are counting shaping
Food certainly gets the children’s attention. They can easily relate to the items and they can manipulate them in so many ways. Great activity!
Exactly. Cooking and preparing food helps integrate many math learning concepts.
I have learned so much from this blog and am very glad I found it. We don’t yet know when we will go back to our classroom, but when we do, I will be sure to use a lot of the lessons I came a
cross here for my students. Thanks
These are also fun ways to incorporate kids in preparing and enjoying meals!
Great ideas to incorporate healthy eating and math
I agree we love to incorporate food, learning together but makes for vfc a vfc wonderful learning environment.
This is a really creative and hands on activity that parents can do with their child when it comes to snack time!! Yummm! While prepping their snacks, parents can ask their child what veggies or fruits they are chopping up.
Love the number sense idea of creating figures out of food.
Love the idea of counting with the veggies and fruit, make snack time fun, mathematical learning, & open their palates to various tastes.
What a great way to count with your child for fun and make snack time and learning experience
I agree Susan! Such a fun way for parents to involve their children in snack time. Thank you for sharing Diann. I think parents who are not teachers can really appreciate these easy math
concepts while having a good time with their little ones.
This is a fun way to bring math into the home not just during this time of staying at home, but year round. Parents can use this even before their kids start school.
Its a great idea that parents involve the children during snack time preparation. Its an easy way to teach children math concepts while have a great time preparing their own snack
defiantly and also to incorporate healthy snack choices into bright colored fruits and veggies
i agree defiantly and it also helps to incorporate healthy snack choices into bright colored fruits and veggies
It also helps to incorporate healthy snack choices into bright colored fruits and veggies in math patterns
very nice way to learn math with vegetables, and fruits, is very interesting for child and keep his focus and engagement to learn
Great ideas. I love how this can teach kids nutrition and math skills.
These are great! I wish I had that creativity when my twin boys were in preschool. They are now 13 yrs old and would think I have lost my mind! 🙂
I really enjoyed this blog. I can use this at home with my granddaughters. Very healthy creative meals, colorful, math, and fun. This is an enjoyable way to do math.
I enjoyed this blog. I can use this healthy, fun, colorful, and tasty way, to teach my granddaughters math.
This is an amazingly healthy fun blog. thank you so much I truly enjoyed it.
This is wonderfully written and has given me food for thought 🙂 about using meals and snack time to engage my kiddos in math activities. Thank you for this!
This is very creative. It is a great way to bring an understanding of math into our daily lives. It can make a lesson very meaningful. Thank you for this wonderful activity.
It’s amazing the things a child can learn from simple cooking activities. I never realized how much I was teaching my own children when I would have them in the kitchen with me!
It was exciting to see the different idea and how using fruits and vegetables can be turned into a math lesson. I surely will be doing these things with my daycare children.
Very fun and creative to engage children in creating food patterns, shapes and doing something they will enjoy and learn from. I loved this lesson so much
Great idea. Never thought to make sorting by size or color part of snacktime. Thanks!
I cook everyday three times a day, so I usually encourage one to one correspondence with my preschooler at this time. I ask her to set plates and cups if we are missing any I ask her how many more do we need?. I also do sorting, and stable order rule when I count how many quesadillas I gave her, compared to her siblings. When we count how many quesadillas we ate in total I make sure I use appropriate vocabulary as well.