Sandy hands Emma and Gabriel a bag of teff flour (as seen here). She says "Any child who can tell me how many cups of flour are in this bag will have for their reward half a loaf of banana bread to themselves." Emma and Gabriel are not fond of math, but they are fond of banana bread.Gabriel took the challenge first, working to convert 454 grams into ounces, and ounces into cups. Too bad mass to volume conversions don't really work. At all. (Unless you've got some additional information like density or something.) We tried not to give him too many clues, but encouraged him to read the back of package, especially the top of the package, assuring him that the information that would lead them to banana bread was there. After some panicked* comments from Beeb like, "Is this a trick question?" I realized he hadn't yet been introduced to "Serving Size", so didn't quite get how that information would help him. After a quick conversation about serving size he was merrily on his way to banana bread.
* Panic because the prize involved food. Good food, ie: safe banana bread, is greater than or equal to happiness. Thus the loss of the prize equals the loss of food equals the loss of happy.
Emma's turn! She found the "Serving Size" and "Servings per Container"
information very quickly (how she was introduced to those terms and he
was not, I do not know). Working out the fractions took her a little
more time ("Fractions, they taunt me." she says). Once she got her
story problem properly set up, though, it wasn't bad going. Soon enough she had a solution to present to her mom. |
| Yea! Banana bread! |
