Having a Snack? Time to Do Some Math!
The more we can involve real life in math lessons and math lessons in real life, the more relevant students will see math and the more motivated they will be to learn it.
Making Math Relevant Through Real-Life Activities
I have been creating many at-home math activities as part of math session homework these days. These are fun math homework ideas! It’s summer, so why not have some fun while learning?!
A Fun At-Home Math Activity: The Snack Challenge
Having a snack is a great time to do some math practice! I just sent this activity to one of my students:
Follow these steps for the Snack Challenge:
Find a food in your home that has its serving size in both cups and grams.
What food did you find?What is the serving size in cups?
What is the serving size in grams?
Measure out that amount of the food (or, if you have a kitchen scale, you can weigh out the portion).
Answer these questions:
Does it seem like a lot of food or not much food?
Are you surprised by the amount of food that is one serving?Eat the serving of food.
Answer these questions:
Was it a lot of food or not much food?
How much fuller do you feel?
13 Creative Ways to Use Snacks for Math Practice
The student loved the idea of his math homework involving having a snack! This gave me ideas for how I could incorporate having a snack into his future math homework:
Counting the number of pieces of food in one serving and using division to determine the average number of grams per piece of food.
Counting the number of pieces of food in one serving and using division to determine the average number of calories per piece of food.
If the snack is nuts or cereal, determining the fraction and percentage of the pieces that are broken (not whole), and the odds that a random piece is a broken piece.
Portioning out servings multiple times and determining the average number of pieces per serving.
What fraction and what percentage of the mass are fat, carbohydrates, and protein? Given the number of grams per piece of food, and the fraction or percentage of the food that is fat, carbohydrates, or protein, how many grams of fat, carbohydrates, and protein are there per piece of food (on average)?
Given that people burn around 5 calories per minute spent walking, how long would you need to walk to “walk off” this snack? (Or, to be more precise, use a table like the one on this webpage: https://www.verywellfit.com/walking-calories-burned-per-minute-3887138)
If you only ate this food all day, how much of it would you need to eat to get all the necessary calcium, or iron, or another nutrient, for the day? On average, how many milligrams of potassium, calcium, iron, etc. are there per piece of food?
If there is this number of grams of fibre (or this many milligrams of calcium, etc.) and that is this percentage of the daily value, how many grams (or milligrams) of fibre (or something else) do people need per day?
If there are this many milligrams of calcium (or another nutrient) in one serving of this food, how many grams is that?
If there are this many grams of sugars (or something else) in one serving of this food, how many milligrams is that?
Once they have eaten the snack, ask them how much time they think they spent eating the snack.
Tell them the price of the container of the snack - how much does each serving cost? How much does each piece cost, on average?
If someone needs to eat 2000 calories in a day, and they only ate this food, how much would their food cost them for that day?
There is so much math in life! That’s why I always say that life is math and math is life! These activities are excellent opportunities for real-life math for students!
The more we can involve students in practical math practice, the more relevant students will see math and the more motivated they will be to learn it.
Why not try out some of these fun math homework ideas to engage in some fun math learning for summer?
Feel free to comment your ideas for math activities at home to share them with others!
If you are looking for personalized math tutoring, book a consultation with Nicole or book a tutoring session for your student!