Making Cookies

Hooray for chocolate chip cookies! Ask your mathematicians to triple a chocolate chip cookie recipe and then reduce the recipe by one-fourth. Your class may need two days to complete, tripling the recipe the first day and reducing the recipe the second. Start by discussing with the class the different ways to multiply the mixed numbers in the recipe by three or three-fourths. This is a good opportunity to use the distributive property in a real-life situation and to talk about what is realistic. Do we have the tools to measure five-sixteenths of a cup? The exercise is comprehensive, involving multiplication of fractions and mixed numbers.