Today, Reid and I are in the kitchen whipping up some math practice with fruit salad and trail mix.
Reid, my four year old, LOVES to help me in the kitchen, so I wasn’t surprised when he thoroughly enjoyed today’s Kids Create activity.
I call it,
I took recipes that have several ingredients and are very flexible, and threw some dice into the mix. Literally! Simply roll the die or dice and put that many of each ingredient in the recipe.
You can use traditional dice or numbered dice. We got our numbered dice from a Home Depot Kids Workshop activity but you could really use any kind of die.
We started with making fruit salad.
I had Reid cut up and prep the fruit. I think this is great for helping kids hone their fine motor skills and introduce fractions.
He used a lettuce knife to do all the cutting, which is great for kids because it looks legit (so they are excited to use it) and it has enough bite to it, that it can cut through things fairly easily. But!…it won’t cut them. You can read more about it and other kinds of cutting utensils that are appropriate for children, in my Rainbow Fruit Parfait post here.
Once all the fruit was prepped, he rolled just one die and added the appropriate number of each kind of fruit. I let him roll first, and then choose which fruit to apply the number to. That way he could reserve the larger numbers for the fruits he loves and smaller ones for the ones he likes less.
Mix and enjoy!
The next recipe we used was trail mix. We made ours a dessert like trail mix but you can set it up however you like with what you have on hand.
I had him use two dice this time which yielded larger numbers. This suited the small pieces much better but he required more help from me.
Once we were all done, we were rewarded with a scrumptious result!
Reid was so proud of his trail mix that he decided to bring what remained to preschool for show and tell. That was my reward….seeing him treasure our time together more than his Lloyd Ninjago Lego guy (which he was originally going to bring). He waited to eat the rest of it, until his dad got home, so he could show him and share it with him. (oh how I love him!)
If your older school age child is learning double digit numbers, the trail mix would be perfect for that age group. Make after school snack time, learning time as well!
Do you have other recipes that would suit “roll a recipe” well? Please comment! I would love more ideas.
Thanks! 🙂
Love this idea! I'm going to try it with my number precocious four year old.
What about make your own pizza? Eventually could lead to learning fractions…
What a great idea! I see snack time roll a recipe in our future!
What fun idea! Maybe you could do this with Chex mix? My little man will love this! Thanks for sharing.
My daughter would love this!! One night at dinner I decided to try the roll-a-dice technique to get her to eat her food. (She isn't picky, she just never wants to eat at dinner time!) I told her she had to roll the dice and eat that many bites, and she had so much fun with it that she just kept rolling until her whole plate was gone. I'm definitely going to try your game this weekend.
Love the roll a recipe idea. My kids would love it! Also I love your white dishes. Are they a dish set and where are they from?
Thanks!
Andrea Nelson
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Such a fun idea. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Delia!! Really cute photos and nice idea, I'll try it with my nephew, he'll love it! !!
I sent you the questions for the interview. Have you received it?
You are such a great mom! My kids would think this was so fun, too.
Jenn and Brandy – Pizza and chex mix sound perfect! Love that.
Crystalyn – that is so funny! Love it when a plan does the complete opposite of backfire, like that.
Andrea – yep. They are the $20 dish set from IKEA. I don't remember the name – sorry. But it's the plain white set that comes in a pack of six place settings. We have only had one plate chip, but for a
That is a great idea!
What a fun idea!
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So great! Love this simple and sweet idea.
Such a cute idea!
Healthy food is necessary to remain healthy for child.