Category: Math and Food

It’s almost summer now

How much water should you drink? How much pee is in this pool? How has the presence of lyme disease changed? Which is the best drink deal at the fair?

Souvenirs and concessions

This activity is an introduction to systems of equations with easy, motivating problems that deal with the cost of stadium purchases for food and souvenirs. These can be done by any puzzle solving students.

Mother’s Day ideas (14 activities)

Updated! How much do we spend on Mother’s Day – Use the Mother’s Day event to engage your students in approximating, reasoning, and investigating as students estimate how much is spent in the United States for Mother’s Day. For what…

Guacamole for Cinco de Mayo

This activity involves recipe analysis, pricing, and comparison. Students gather the ingredients for a famous recipe and analyze how much it would cost to make it at home versus buying it at the restaurant.

New bust of King Charles … in chocolate

Saturday, King Charles will be crowned as the King of the United Kingdom. Artists at the Mars Wrigley company made a gorgeous chocolate bust of the King wearing his military uniform. We wondered how much that big piece of chocolate cost to make.

Spring and Easter ideas – 6 activities

Dyeing eggs with food coloring – Students use the chart on the back of a food dye package to compare the strangely different recipes listed for coloring a cake, icing, or dyeing eggs. They look for and create equivalent ratios…

Two 12s or one 18?

Which should we order and why? Two 12-inch pizzas or one 18-inch pizza?  Which will give you more pizza? More crust? Which is the better deal?

Square or Round – which pizza should I buy?

Warm up for π day with this updated activity!
If that slice from Sbarro is from an 18-inch pizza cut into eight pieces, which deal is better when comparing area of pizza and cost?  How does the area of a square pizza compare to the area of a circular pizza?

Valentine’s Day (11 activities)

Have a heart Canstruction – Students use reasoning and approximation to analyze the number of cans of food contained in this one giant heart.  Consider starting out the activity by showing students the picture of the heart and doing a see…

Chocolate heart-shaped raspberry cake

For Valentine’s Day, bake a cake. Students calculate base area or volume of cakes made from 2 cake pan sizes and observe how the volume of the cake changes with the increased pan size.  This is an activity intended to…

Sweetheart candies

How many dollars worth of sweetheart candies used to be sold each Valentine’s season? How much is one candy worth? After Valentine’s Day their price is reduced. How much are they worth then?

Before the holidays (16 activities)

We have tons (well, 16) of activities to bring to your class in this last week before the holiday break. Movies, science, art, cooking, economics, weather and the logic of calendars. Enjoy!

Whole lot of cookies

Jennifer Fairbanks from Hopkinton, MA sent us this picture of the cookies that she baked in 4 hours using 13 eggs and 5 cups of sugar. Do you see some math here?