Active math games are more fun than worksheets, aren’t they? I was reminded of a great phrase this week : hands on, brains on! Children learn through their senses, through hands-on play and through doing. This idea combines all three – let’s bake some shapes!
Math games :: bake some shapes!
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If you’ve never baked bread before, don’t be put off! This recipe is super easy. It’s taken from by e-book The Homemade Play Dough Recipe Book {which you can download here} and makes a simple bread dough that’s only improved by the children playing with it.
To make the dough we used
500 g strong bread flour
a slug of olive oil
a 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast
300 ml water
{there’s a printable recipe in the book}
Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, and knead with your hand or a wooden spoon to bring it all together into a dough.
When I’m baking with the children I add a little extra flour to the dough, so it’s easier for them to handle and we don’t just end up with a table and child covered in stickiness. Everyone gets their own piece of dough to play with – and what a super sensory material it is.
You can roll it, and squish it, and squash it! Baking bread is one of the most requested activities here, so if you’ve never tried it before I would encourage you to give it a go. It’s a great science lesson, and good for developing children’s hand and wrist strength, paving the way for holding pencils and doing up buttons.
And you can play some fun math games with bread dough too. Today we decided to bake some shapes. We used some cookie cutters but if you don’t have those I bet you can find some cups, bowls, and plates in a variety of shapes, or just use a blunt knife to cut some out.
We baked the bread shapes in the oven (Gas 7 / 220C / 425F) for about 10 minutes.
Once they’ve cooled, you could use some icing {frosting} to add in some art, exploring the shapes a little further. Tubes of writing icing or icing ‘paints’ are great for children, as they’re easy for them to use.
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This is an awesome idea. I look forward to doing this activity with my lil’ ones and sharing it with other families. Thank you
Thanks Jerneal – hope you have some baking fun.
I’m confused. Where does the math come in? I can see all the motor skill development benefits of teaching kids to bake, and that’s great, but the math part seems to have been glossed over. As someone who hates math, I’m always interested in ideas that might make it entertaining, or at least palatable, but I think I missed something here.
Hi Chris. There’s lots of math going on here: we measured the ingredients using weight and volume. We selected cookie cutters in various shapes which gave the opportunity to pick out shapes we knew and learn the names of those we didn’t. Then as we made shapes with the dough we were thinking again about the names and properties of them. The icing at the end also worked on the idea of the outline of each shape. You’re right of course that the dough is a great work out for motor skills, but baking and cooking in general offers lots of opportunity to work on every day maths skills too. We have lots more math idea in our archive if you’d like to see them: https://cathyjames.org/category/maths