Cooking with kids is a natural way to do math together. But we’re not talking about turning meal preparation into a formal math lesson. Cooking together presents an opportunity that is more about noticing and wondering rather than teaching.

From an early age, children notice and appreciate patterns in the world around them. Patterns and sequences of different kinds begin to pop up all over the place, especially in the books that children love.

A child is pushed to decipher the repeating pattern in an array of blocks. Then he attempts to continue the pattern.

A child makes patterns using keys.

A student identifies a pattern of increasing quantity.

Joanne Mulligan shows a young student’s emerging understanding of the concept of “pattern.”