Back To Online School – Recipe for Success
(Provided by CalPac, Friday, September 14, 2012)
As the online school year starts and you begin your math classes again, it sometimes feels like you’ve lost some of the math you learned over the summer. Fractions and basic facts are often right there on the edge of your brain, just waiting to be accessed J One fun and easy way to practice fractions and mental math is by using recipes, creating recipes, and doubling and halving recipes.
Take my mom’s amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe:
2 sticks butter
1 ½ cups sugar (½ brown, ½ white)
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
2 ¼ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 ½ - 2 cups chocolate chips
Using this simple and delicious recipe can provide lots of opportunities to use mental math and practice dividing and multiplying fractions. For example, I found that I wanted to make a smaller batch of these cookies on a regular basis, so that it wouldn’t take as long to bake all of them and would make a smaller amount. So I halved the recipe using mental math (or you could write it down!). Go ahead and try creating the half recipe now (answer at end of article).
Splitting the butter into tablespoons, measuring out the vanilla, sugar, and flour, and keeping track of how many chocolate chips you eat while making the cookies, are all simple ways to brush up on your basic facts and fractions to get your brain warmed up again. Speaking of warmed up, a half batch of cookies just came out of the oven – time to enjoy!
(Half Batch Recipe)
1 stick butter
¾ cups sugar (½ brown, ½ white)
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1 1/8 cups flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¾ - 1 cup chocolate chips
Cream butter (slightly melted) and sugar together. Add vanilla and egg and mix. Then add flour and baking soda and mix. Finally, stir in chocolate chips and bake at 350⁰ for 7 – 10 minutes. Enjoy!
Katie Cook
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