Munch Your Math: A DIY Pizza Game
I have this weird thing about math, which isn’t helped by my tendency to do complicated-to-me quilt block calculations at 10 pm (A 4.5″ quilt block has a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides. How many blocks will I need to cut to have a finished 40″x60″ quilt? I want to put a heart-shaped applique on every other quilt block on this quilt, NOT including the border blocks. How many applique hearts do I need to cut out? Yawn…).
Of course, I earned my math aversion by doing decades worth of really, really boring, irrelevant, and repetitive math worksheets in school, so that now I have difficulty doing relevant, interesting, not really that complicated math as an adult. It’s my goal, then, to keep math super-fun for my little girls. There are only so many games of Uncle Wiggly or 1-25 BINGO that an adult can play, however, so I’ve taken to DIY-ing my kids some math activities out of recycled materials. I made them an arithmetic matching game, and now I’m going to make them a fractions pizza game. Here’s how:
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The basic premise of this game is that you will create some big circles out of sturdy cardboard and then cut them into very precise fractions of a circle–1/4, 1/8, 1/16, etc.–and then your kiddos can play at rebuilding the circle with the slices. The beauty of the game is that you can customize it for your own kiddos. For my two-and four-year-old, I made three pizzas’ worth of pieces so that they have ample slices with which to build cooperatively, not competitively. You could jigger the game to be competitive, however. You could instead build little personal pizzas for one child to work with independently. You could make up playing cards that ask the kiddos to use particular fractions to build their pizza. See? Customizable.
You will need: Some big pieces of sturdy cardboard (pizza boxes, the boxes your Christmas presents came out of, damaged matte board, etc.); a very sharp craft knife (my daughters of a crafty momma know not to touch these); template for a big circle (dinner plate, rim of a mixing bowl, etc.); ruler; sharp pencil; art materials for the kiddos to use to decorate their pizzas.
1. Decide how many and of what size your pizzas will be, and lay out your circle templates on your sturdy cardboard. I used some old matte board, and I did this on the floor.
2. Trace around your circle templates with a sharp pencil, and very carefully cut them out with your sharp craft knife. Even though a craft knife is super-sharp (for god’s sake, be careful!), it will likely take a few passes to cut completely through the cardboard.
3. Using your ruler and pencil, divide your pizzas up into slices. I cut one pizza into quarters, one into eighths, and one into sixteenths. It’s important to be extremely accurate here, since the whole point is for your kids to learn how these fractions work together to make a whole. If they DON’T work together to make a whole, well, that’s a completely different lesson, now, isn’t it?
4. I let my kids decorate one side of each slice as a pizza, and on the backside of each slice I wrote its fraction and decimal equivalents. My hope is that this game will last long enough for those numbers to become meaningful to my very little girls.
5. Figure out the rules of your particular pizza game, share the rules with some particular kiddos, and then turn those kiddos loose. See? The American obsession with food CAN come in handy!
Not only does this project utilize recycled materials, but hopefully I can use it to keep modeling to my children that when we need something, we make it instead of buying it, and that learning is something fun that we can do together as a family.
How do you do math with your kiddos?
