Practical Maths 1. Baking.

I know that lots of people started really strongly with home-schooling but, as time has passed by, lessons have become less structured and less frequent. I totally understand this. People are re-assessing exactly what is important in their lives and, unsurprisingly, knowing the different types of noun doesn’t make the top ten list. Instead, parents are using this extra time with their children to do special things such as baking, cooking and learning to sew, passing on skills that they, themselves learned from parents and grandparents. This is lovely and I really do think that with a bit of creative thinking we can do the fun stuff AND the learning stuff; in this way, children will have the best of both worlds.

Maths and baking make excellent bedfellows- I bet that’s a statement you didn’t think you’d ever read. Even better, creating a ‘baking business’ in which you cost out, measure and bake then create advertisements and packaging for your product, gives you a project that could engage everyone for a week- all working together to create the ‘ultimate brownie’ or whatever culinary delight tickles your fancy. The possibilities for fun AND learning are endless.

Here are my top five ideas for linking baking and maths:

1.       Teach scaling. In Year 6, children need to learn how to scale numbers up and down. This sounds extremely complicated but what it actually means is saying things like, ‘If I need 200g of sugar for one muffin, how much will I need for 4 muffins?’ How much will I need for a muffin half the size?’

2.        Teach ratio. Basically, ‘I need 3 cups of raisins for every 2 cups of flour,’ (can you tell I’m not a baker?!) How many cups of raisins will I need if I have 4 cups of flour? 6 cups of flour…’ etc.

3.       Reinforce calculations methods, i.e. division-  We have £54.00 with which to buy ingredients for our new business. We need to split this between 6 batches of muffins… how many batches can we make…

4.       Teach measures. All children need to know how to convert basic measures: 1kg = 1000g, 1l= 1000ml etc. Simply start by writing your ingredients in grams AND kilograms (i.e. 400g = 0.4kg) It’s a quick and easy trick that really gets children to see the links between the measures that they use.

5.       Problem solve with measures. These problems definitely won’t have to be contrived- you do need to know that, if you only have 1kg of flour left, you can only bake 5 more muffins/ 3 more biscuits etc.

So there you go. As well as inspiring a future generation of bakers, why not encourage them to be business men and women as well.

Happy baking everyone 😊