Cookies are delicious, and baking them is really fun too. When we talked about multiplication and division, we used the example of cookies and chocolate chips. Grouping our chocolate chips to make sure that there were an equal amount per cookie was the idea behind the lesson. If we have 3 cookies and 15 chocolate chips, how many chocolate chips can we put on each cookie? We also learned with multiplication that the questions can be interpreted two different ways.
The first way of 3x5 being that we have 3 cookies and 5 chocolate chips on each cookie. How many chocolate chips do we have? We could also look at it as 5x3 where we have 5 cookies with 3 different chocolate chips on each. This is partially exploring on factors - that there are different ways to represent one number. When we put the numbers into context, 3x5 and 5x3 represent different things, but the end result is the same - we still have the same number of chocolate chips.
Every concept in math is stemmed from another idea, and is the gateway to another concept down the road. All of our mathematical concepts are interrelated. When we put real-life contexts into our concepts, it makes the idea that much more attainable. Also, when we are looking at similar problems down the road - i.e. another cookie problem on a test - the students can more easily identify that they have seen this problem before and may find it easier to understand and solve the problem.
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