I decided that every week needs to have something fun in it that also relates to school because I don’t want Eli and Ava to think school is all about doing worksheets and computer programs. Being with friends is an equally crucial part of school, but since that isn’t happening right now, I decided to bring a little socialization to our homeschool room! Introducing Baking with Math…Colleen’s Cooking Classroom….Kitchen Math….something like that. Haven’t settled on the name just yet, but we had our first class and it was a rousing success! There is so much math in baking ~ and you better do that math correct or you’ll end up with a flat cake, salty cookies, and runny icing!

I thought for our first class we would make a standard favorite of every kid – Chocolate Chip Cookies. My mom’s recipe uses a box of vanilla instant pudding mix to give an extra vanilla flavor while keeping the cookies fluffy, but I only had chocolate pudding in our pantry, so our final cookie ended up being Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies. No one complained 🙂 We had 6 little chefs in the kitchen, so I divided up ingredients giving each person a couple ingredients to be responsible for, but everyone helped with the math. Between counting the number of ingredients we needed, measuring 3/4 cup of sugar using a 1/4 cup measuring cup, and figuring out how many eggs would be left in the carton after we used 2 of them, we had lots of math fun! The best math was taking a plate of 10 warm cookies and subtracting from it as we passed the cookies around to eat 🙂