The grocery store is one of the best examples of a place where the ability to use mathematics is put to work in the “real world.”
It’s a great place to practice measurement and estimation and to learn about volume and quantity and their relationships to the sizes and shapes of containers—geometry!
Preschool
Making a grocery shopping list can be both enjoyable and an opportunity to reinforce young children’s number sense.
What You Need
• List of grocery items
• Color pictures of grocery items cut from magazines, catalogs or advertising flyers (for example, choose pictures of different kinds of vegetables, fruit, containers of milk or juice, cans of soup, boxes of cereal and crackers, loaves of bread)
• Index cards (or similar-sized cards cut from heavy paper)
• Glue stick
• Small box (large enough to hold the cards)
What to Do
• Put together the set of food pictures and help your child paste each picture onto a card. Then have your child sit with you as you make up a grocery shopping list. Read the list aloud to her, item by item, saying, for example, “We need to buy milk. Find the picture of the milk.” When the child finds the picture, have her put it in the box. Continue through the list, asking her to find pictures of such things as apples, potatoes, bread, soup and juice.
• When you’ve finished, ask your child to tell you how many things you need to buy, then help her to count the pictures in the box.
• Ask your child to put all the pictures of vegetables in one group, then all the pictures of fruit in another group. (You might continue with items that are in cans, items that are in boxes and so on.)
• Point to one group of pictures, such as the fruit. Help her to count the number of pictures in that group. Have her do the same for other groups.
Parenting viewpoints from parents in the trenches, because parenting doesn’t come with a manual. In addition to