The Math of Bread
12/1/2018
This week we explored what kinds of bread we like. We began Monday by making cinnamon rolls. This recipe was a great place to start because the children were able to observe how similar the cinnamon roll dough was to the bread dough we had made previously. They noted that it felt similar, was made with similar ingredients, and also required kneading and rising time. Cinnamon rolls also introduced the concept of adding a different ingredient to make new types of bread. We took the list of suggestions (from our morning question) for what to add to dough to make new types of bread, and created a shopping list for a walking trip to Fred Meyers. The plan was to buy different breads and let the children perform a taste test, exploring which types of bread they liked. Unfortunately our shopping trip was postponed to next week due to the earthquake Friday. Baking breads and asking questions about how they taste provides students with opportunities to expand their math skills. Baking lets students practice basic math through reading numbers from recipes, counting, and measuring. It also promotes mathematical thinking in contrasting, comparing, estimating, and spatial reasoning. Our second baking project for the week was to make biscuits using a recipe from one of our story books. Students observed how this dough felt different from the cinnamon rolls, but was the same in that we needed to use a rolling pin to flatten the dough. We also used a new tool--a pastry blender--to combine the shortening into the flour. We used estimation skills to make predictions of how the biscuits would taste based on the ingredients. In addition to baking we have also been using graphs to help us see and process this learning. Our favorite graph right now is one charting how we felt about the taste of the bread we made. Students chose between "I like it, I like it a little, and I do not like it" for both recipes we made this week. Graphs allow children to see differences and similarities, provide many opportunities for one-to-one correspondence counting, simple addition and allow them to read the graph through the pictures and numbers. Our explorers are excited about the graphs we make and enjoy reading them and sharing them with visitors to the class. They feel empowered about their learning and now want to count all kinds of things. We can't finish a morning meeting without counting our responses to the morning question. We had the BEST time in our new snow this week! We made many, many snowmen, rolled monster snowballs, and laughed a lot!
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April 2021
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