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We wanted to make strawberry shortcake, so we needed to bake shortcake biscuits. We did a lot of math while we prepared the biscuits! Read about what we did and think of ways you can talk about math while baking or cooking.
Geometry: 3-Dimensional Shapes
Geometry: 3-Dimensional Shapes
To make any kind of biscuit, you have to cut pieces of fat like the butter we used into the dry ingredients. It's important that the butter is cold and very hard so that it won't melt. That also means you can cut it into interesting shapes!
What shape is this? How can you tell?
It's a triangular prism. It has two faces that are triangles, and they are parallel to each other. The other faces are all rectangles.
What other shapes can you cut from a stick of butter before using it?
You could pretty easily make rectangular prisms or cubes. (Like the shape of a box or a block.) Maybe you could figure out how to cut other prisms or pyramids too!
Measurement
Measurement
Our biscuits were circle-shaped and they were supposed to be 3 inches in diameter. (The diameter of a circle passes through the exact center of the circle and spans the entire circle. Diameter is usually not a focus in elementary school, but it made sense to talk about it anyway when we measured.)
How close were we to making 3-inch circles? How can you tell?
Our circles were smaller than 3 inches. They weren't quite 2 1/2 inches in diameter.
We can see the line that shows halfway between 2 and 3 inches, and our biscuit isn't quite that big.
What do all these lines between the whole numbers of inches show?
They show parts of whole inches. The line halfway between 0 and 1, for example, shows half an inch.
(Fractions on a number line are usually introduced in third grade. Many third graders also measure to the nearest half- and quarter-inch.)
Spatial Reasoning
Spatial Reasoning
We made circle-shaped biscuits. We had to think carefully about how to cut them out without wasting too much dough. We also had to think carefully about how to fit all the circles on our pan.
What do you notice about how we cut circles from the dough? How would you do it?
What do you notice about how we put the biscuits on the pan? How would you do it?
What other circle shapes can you find at home? What do you notice about trying to fit them into a closed area like a pan? How can you fit the most circles into a rectangular area?
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