When cooking with kids, letting your children choose what to cook based on what they like to eat is a good place to start. With that in mind, your library will have a variety of children's cook books to choose from if you don't already have one. Or, an internet search for "kids' recipes" will turn up hundreds of ideas for every eater.

Following recipes involves lots of counting, arithmetic, measuring volumes and weights, temperatures, and lengths of time. Some kids are just learning the difference between more and less, while others are learning about fractions. If your child is very young he can help you count the number of potatoes you need. Counting the number of marshmallows, chocolate squares, and graham crackers you need for each person to have one S'more teaches 1-to-1 correspondence. With older kids you can talk about estimation vs. exact measurement, and ratios as relationships between ingredients. Multiplying or dividing recipes allows practice with fractions. When shopping together, add up the cost of the ingredients.

Think in terms of word problems

Expressing math problems in words or stories makes math concepts meaningful by showing how they're useful in the real world. You can ask a younger child, "If we have 5 people in the family, and each person gets 2 cookies, how many should we put on this plate?" Or ask an older child, "if this recipe will feed 4 people but we need to feed 12, how much sugar, flour, salt, and eggs do we need to mix together?"

Experimentation fosters creativity and problem solving

When you give your kids the freedom to try different ingredients, flavor combinations, or even amounts, they get a real-world lesson in finding different ways to solve a problem, learning what works and what doesn't, and you help them build the confidence in their own ideas. It can be as simple as trying peppermint instead of chocolate chips. A child can quickly learn the difference between ½ teaspoon of salt and a ½ cup of salt this way. As one teacher said, "A lesson learned with the sense of taste is not easily forgotten!" The key is to emphasize that we can learn from every experiment and talk about what we'd do the same or differently next time.

Now all we need is some suggestions for finding the math in cleaning up!

Looking for kid-friendly recipes?

• The San Diego Zoo offers a recipe for each letter in the alphabet, and features a different animal with each. Making Kangaroo Kabobs for example, your child will not only make a fun, healthy snack, she'll learn something about this Australia native!
• The FamilyFun website has a section on cooking with kids, and some enticing recipes — like Strawberry Mice!
• KidsHealth not only has some fun recipe ideas (try the Disappearing Zucchini Muffins!), they offer specialized sections for kids with several different medical conditions, like cystic fibrosis and diabetes.

Parent Tip: Get the DreamBox July Math Activity Calendar

Like other parents, this is the time of year when we're looking for fun ways to reinforce the math our kids learned during the school year. DreamBox can help — we've created a calendar with fun math activities for the whole month of July. (And of course DreamBox Learning K-2 Math is the most fun a child can have learning math online!) Download the calendar here, then, hang it on your fridge, and you won't run out of math fun all month!

Find more parent tips at http://www.dreambox.com/1st-grade-math-tips

Did you know?

You can earn free DreamBox months!

When you become a DreamBox subscriber, you can earn free DreamBox months by inviting friends to try it too. As soon as you start your subscription you can offer your friends 1 extra free month when they subscribe to DreamBox Learning. And for every new subscription from one of your friends, you'll get a free month of DreamBox too!

Don't eat the marshmallow! The connection between self control and school success

Research described in a recent Science Daily article, "Self-regulation Game Predicts Kindergarten Achievement," discovered that children with the ability to control their behavior achieved stronger scores in reading, vocabulary, and math. Learn more about this study in the DreamBox blog "Self-Discipline Predicts Math Learning and School Success," where you'll also get to watch a hilarious video of kids trying not to eat a marshmallow!