It might prove beneficial to let your child play with his or her cereal in the morning.
When it comes to teaching kindergartners, traditional methods of teaching don’t really work. So that’s why you need to think outside of the box.
Here’s an idea: teach your young children the basics of mathematics by letting them play with their food.
Start with breakfast. Deemed as the most important meal of the day, breakfast is a great time for your children to jumpstart their day. Eating breakfast just got fun…
To encourage estimation, a tool your kids will need to learn to do basic kindergarten math, you’ll need:
- Cereal (with one general shape, like Cheerios, not Lucky Charms – Cheerios is healthier anyway)
- Bowl and spoon (and milk)
- Baggie
So what exactly do you have to do?
- Explain to your children what estimation means. “A good guess about how many of something we see.”
- Have your child scoop a spoonful of cereal, ask them to guess how many are on that spoon (without counting!).
- Count the number of individual cereals together. Ask them questions like, “Was your estimation close? and “Were there more or less cereal on the spoon than you thought?”
- Put the spoonful of cereal into a baggie, have your children scoop a few more spoonfuls in that same baggie, and have them estimate that.
- Ask them the same questions to encourage some thinking on their part, this time based on the amount in the baggie.
- Dump the cereal from the baggie into a bowl, add milk, and let your children have their breakfast as they count the cereal.
Everyday activities like eating breakfast can be a fun activity that you can do with your child. Who would have thought that learning the “guess and check” method can start with cereal?
What do you think of this activity? Is it something you would try? Do you have other educational, food-related activities that you do with your children that you would want to share?
Estimation Breakfast [Education]
