Baking a Cake

What words in this list tell us about how we will need to measure our ingredients?
Words like cup and tablespoon tell us how we will need to measure the right amount of flour, cornstarch, sugar, and margarine or butter.

Let's find the tools we need to measure these ingredients.
In our home, we have a 1-tablespoon measuring spoon. We can count whole tablespoons of cornstarch. We also have 1/4- and 1/2-cup measuring cups, but no 3/4-cup measuring cups. What a great opportunity to think about fractions! (See below.)

What does the slash in some of the numbers in our ingredient list mean?
The slash separates the numerator (top number) and the denominator (bottom number) of a fraction. The denominator tells us the size of the unit fraction (e.g., one-fourth) and the numerator tells us how many of those unit fractions we need (e.g., three one-fourths make 3/4).

How can we measure 3/4 cup of flour when none of our measuring cups show 3/4?
We can count 1/4 cup 3 times.
We could measure 1/2 cup and then 1/4 cup.

Let's look at our measuring cups. How could we use them to measure out 3/4 cup of flour or 1/2 cup of sugar?
In our home, we keep flour and sugar in jars. Sometimes, we use smaller measuring cups because they fit through the mouths of the jars more easily. So we might use 2 scoops of 1/4 cup to measure 1/2 cup of sugar. How many ways can you find to measure your ingredients with the cups in your home?

Check out this stick of butter! What do you notice?
We need 1 Tablespoon for our cake.
There are 8 Tablespoons in 1/2 cup. That means there are 16 Tablespoons in a whole cup.
It looks like a number line on the bottom and kind of like fraction bars on top with the red bars showing parts of a cup.

We can line up two sticks of butter to see what 1 whole cup of butter would look like. When students are thinking about fractions, it's often very helpful to see what the entire whole looks like.

The recipe said we needed to bake the cake for 7 minutes. We were surprised the baking time was so short! If our microwave timer showed this time, how long had the cake been baking?
12 seconds.

What would the microwave timer show if the cake had been baking for half the time needed?
3:30. That would mean 3 minutes and 30 seconds because 30 seconds is half a minute.

What would the microwave timer show if the cake had been baking for 4 minutes and 30 seconds?
2:30. That would mean it had 2 minutes and 30 seconds left to bake.

How many berries do we have to decorate our cake? Let's see how many ways we can count them.
We could count by ones or twos. We could make a group of 10 and then count the rest. Even very young children can find many ways to group and count a small collection of items like this collection of berries.

If we cut the strawberries into 4 pieces each and we kept the raspberries (the berries without leaves) whole, how many pieces of fruit will we have to decorate the cake?
16 pieces of strawberries plus 12 raspberries is 28 pieces of fruit in all.

How many strawberry pieces are on the cake so far?
6 on each filled parallel side. Plus 4 along the top. That's 16 in all.

Based on how the strawberry pieces are arranged so far, how many strawberry pieces will it take to complete the edge of the cake?
4 more on the bottom ... 20 in all. (We started with 16 pieces and had to cut one last strawberry into 4 pieces to finish.)

The pan shows it measures 8 inches on both sides. What's the total perimeter in inches?
32 inches (because 8 inches x 4 sides produces a total perimeter of 32 inches).

The recipe said we needed a pan that measured 8 x 8 x 2 inches. What volume can the pan hold (in cubic inches)?
8 x 8 inches is 64 square inches. Multiply that by 2 inches and that's 128 cubic inches. (The area of the bottom of the pan is 64 square inches. If it were just 1 inch deep, that would be 64 cubic inches. But it's 2 inches deep: that makes 128 cubic inches of volume in the pan.)