Eat Your Math Homework

by Ann McCallum Staats, Leeza Hernandez (Illustrator)

This collection of yummy recipes and fun math facts is sure to tempt taste buds and make you hungry for more. Explore patterns in nature while you chomp on Fibonacci Stack Sticks. Amaze your friends with delicious Variable Pizza Pi! Wash down your geometry assignment with some Milk and Tangram Cookies.

Topics covered include probability, Fibonacci numbers, tessellations, variability, and more.

Genres: Mathematics, Nonfiction, Picture Books, Cooking, Childrens, Stem, Cookbooks

48 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

A former educator with a master's degree in education, Ann McCallum Staats is an award-winning author. Her book "Fantastic Flora: The World's Biggest, Baddest, and Smelliest Plants" (Candlewick/ MIT Kids Press) shares how some of the weirdest plants survive and thrive. She is also the co-author with astronaut Karen Nyberg of "A Quilt of Stars," releasing Fall, 2026. When she's not writing, Ann travels, mentors, and connects with audiences. Find out more at www.annmccallumbooks.com or on Instagram @annmsbooks or other social media.

Reviews

[Carol Covin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Math teacher Ann McCallum, in trying to make math less scary for her students and to show their parents, often also afraid of math, how simple it could be, started with "mathematical" gingerbread houses. How many steps led up to the door, what was the length of the perimeter of the roof. She soon realized she had struck on something universal - math is not scary when it is illustrated with food. Her delightfully illustrated book, Eat Your Math Homework, is the result. Sophisticated math concepts using anything from fruit kebobs to powdered sugar brownies to illustrate the Fibonacci series and tesselation. Don't miss this gentle, fun introduction to math for your grandchildren in a totally new way while you cook together and eat the results!

For a longer review, check out my blog for grandmas, including an interview with the author, Ann McCallum.

http://newgrandmas.com/21293/funwithg...

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eat Your Math Homework: Recipes for Hungry Minds by Ann McCallum is such an innovative book that can be used to teach students about many different math concepts. It can be used to teach students about how to do fractions with an example of a pizza, and even explains to students about pi. The book can also be used to teach about geometric shapes and allowing students to use tangram cookies. The book also teaches measurement by showing students different recipes to make. I would use this book for children in 1st-3rd grade.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooking. Math. Not the usual subject matter for a kid browsing the library shelves (though I’ve admittedly had more than one kid ask me for cookbooks, so there’s that). Still and all, when I encounter a book like Eat Your Math Homework I think about its intended audience. Look this book up on a site like Amazon and you’ll learn that it was written for the 9-12 aged set. That may well be, but what you’re dealing with is a picture book, for all practical intents and purposes. So it would be a particularly confident tween that picks this puppy up on their own. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have a grand purpose, though. When I read this collaboration between Ann McCallum and Leeza Hernandez I realized that what I had here was a book with a million uses. Parents often approach children’s librarians looking for “the math books”. Thanks to the ever-helpful Dewey Decimal system, these are easy to find. Delve a little deeper into that particular request, however, and you’ll find that what they really want are books about math that are fun, original, and cover specific topics that the kids aren’t quite getting in school. Generally this is when I call upon Stuart J. Murphy and his math titles to aid us in our hour of need, but when a truly creative approach is swauews then only one solution will do: make it tasty. And tasty is the name of the game with this mathie/foodie concoction.

Fibonacci numbers, fractions, tessellations, tangrams, pi, and probability. Pair with snack sticks, chips, brownies, cookies, pizza, and trail mix. Stir together. Serve. In McCallum’s latest title, explaining simple math concepts hinges on kitchen recipes. Want to understand the idea of probability? Hand out some trail mix then follow the book’s directions in showing your guests how to calculate theoretical probability. Fractions more your thing? Make some chips out of tortillas, cutting them into different fractions along the way. Accompanied by Leeza Hernandez’s peppy illustrations, Eat Your Math Homework understands that sometimes making an idea delicious is the best way to cement a concept in the heads of your intended audience.

In this era of child obesity it’s a challenge for any author to write a book of recipes and not fill it with too many sugary or salty snacks. With that in mind, I can only assume that Ms. McCallum had to be especially careful about pairing one recipe with a math concept, and vice-versa. Of course it’s easy to flip too far on the other side of the equation and to ONLY include carrot sticks and cauliflower clumps. This book makes for a nice compromise. You have your speared pineapple in the Fibonacci Snack Sticks and your raisin and Cheerio Probability Trail Mix on the one hand and your Tessellating Two-Color Brownies and Milk and Tangram Cookies on the other. As for the recipes themselves, I’ll confess to you that I haven’t tried any of them. That said, they’re kind of fascinating. Often a seemingly simple recipe will contain a surprising “secret ingredient” that makes you want to try it out in spite of yourself. Consider the inclusion of “½ cup of orange juice” in the brownie recipe, or the “¼ cup hot chocolate drink powder” for the tangram cookies.

Debut illustrator Leeza Hernandez gives the book her own particular spin. Seemingly simple pictures show an array of mathematically bent bunnies that gleefully cook and bake the recipes found in this book while also showing rabbity versions of famous people like Fibonacci and M.C. Escher. Why bunnies? If I don’t miss my guess it probably has something to do with the fact that early on in the title we read a story in which rabbits repopulated at a Fibonacci-like rate. Once you’ve noticed that, you’ll see that Hernandez has cleverly hidden numbers on each rabbit character. And if you start from the beginning, you’ll see that those numbers are written in a Fibonacci sequence. If you don’t notice, mind, you’ll probably wonder why one rabbit sports a 610 on his soccer jersey while another wears 1597 on his party cap. Hernandez has a penchant for including these little details. I suspect more than one kid will also notice that the kicked soccer ball on one two-page spread reappears three pages later, aimed squarely at the head of the M.C. Escher bunny.

So who’s going to use this book the most? Homeschooling parents. Such is the future I see in the crystal ball for Eat Your Math Homework. This isn’t to say that they’ll be the only ones using it. Parents and teachers, once they discover its charms, will flock to the book as well. But for a homeschooler, I can’t help but think that this title is a kind of godsend. We’re all tired of books that propose to “make math fun” (whatever that may mean). Well, maybe it’s not impossible after all. Maybe it can be done. Certainly the book requires parental supervision, and not just because it takes place in the kitchen. A lot of the concepts here are explained to some extent, but leave large gaps where comprehension is needed. For example, Pi will require a little more than the rote explanation found here if kids are going to grasp the concept. This isn’t a flaw. It just means that parents shouldn’t necessarily sit their kids down with the book and then leave the room if they want it to clarify ideas about fractions and Fibonacci.

I never liked math as a kid. I did like brownies. So it’s possible that the book that managed to combine the two would have appealed far more to me than the standard school textbooks I was always handed. Everyone knows that when describing fractions it’s a good idea to explain them in terms of pizza or pie. Why not extend the idea to other mathematical concepts as well? Though I wouldn’t necessarily hand Eat Your Math Homework to a kid for their own enjoyment (though you never know) as a teaching tool for teachers and parents I doubt it can be beat. Bunnies. Edibles. Math. Yum.

For ages 8-11.

[Lynn Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that might have helped me with math and I'm sure it will be helpful to children (and adults) now.
Math is explained in a simple and fun way, using recipes and understandable examples.
Table of Contents:
Introduction;
Kitchen Tips;
Fibonacci Snack Sticks;
Fraction Chips;
Tessellating Two-Color Brownies;
Milk and Tangram Cookies;
Variable Pizza Pi;
Probability Trail Mix;
Math Review;
Glossary;
Index.

[Gema Ramirez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eat Your Math Homework is a wonderful book that is informative and fun for children of all ages. Math and cooking go hand-in-hand, but the author, Ann McCallum, allows children to learn about cooking and integrates it with a wide range of mathematical topics.

One of my favorite recipes from this book was the "Tessellating Two-Color Brownies. I had no idea what a tessellation was until I read the recipe for it. According to McCallum Pg. 19, "It is a pattern of repeating shapes, or polygons, that extend in all directions and that fit together exactly with no gaps or overlays." I thought it fit in well with current events because they show a picture of a soccer ball. Since this year falls upon the World Cup of soccer, I found it instantly appealing. Overall, this was a well-written book and easy to follow along with. McCallum also includes historical information that gives you insight about the world's first mathematicians and their ideas that helped shape mathematics today.

I have paired this book with Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, by Eric Litwin, published May 2012, for my twin text. This new book is good for early subtraction skills, and geared towards a younger age group. It even shows the math equations, which is a great visual aid to help kids learn more quickly. This book is such a simple idea but I believe that children will love it. The way it compares to Eat Your Math Homework is that it teaches counting and beginning subtraction. It also has a sub-idea inlaid in the book, similar to the sub-idea of teaching you how to cook in Eat Your Math Homework. Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons teaches children about emotions and how to handle situations with Pete's signature motto "It's all Good" in a way that kids can understand and apply to their own lives.

[Margaret Chind · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally posted on Creative Madness Mama. 

We are still in the earliest years of math education in our homeschool and I want to make sure that math remains a favored subject and not a dreaded one. Thus when I heard about Ann McCallum's  Eat Your Math Homework I was intrigued and excited about the possibility of adding such a book to our homeschool set up. We are enjoying living books with a math theme and I think an activity book for math will definitely excite my little people. Especially a recipe book will make my six-year-old second grader excited as she is just starting to really be able to help out in the kitchen. For the purposes of this review I received an autographed paperback copy of the book. It is my understanding that  Ann McCallum Books ~ ( http://AnnMcCallumBooks.com/) doesn't just stop with math, but also has Eat Your _____ Homework books for History and Science as well as Math. You can find out more at www.eatyourhomeworkbooks.com. “Do your brain a flavor.” *snicker* ;)



While I've gotten my hands on a paperback or softcover version, it is my understanding that there is also available a library bound edition as well as an eBook available. The Eat Your Homework books are published by Charlesbridge which in the past has provided us with other math living books that we have quite enjoyed so it is no surprise to be quite pleased with this book as well.

47-pages including a glossary, index, and math review find this page filled with recipe after recipe that are written to induce excitement and curiosity about math. There is also an introduction and kitchen tips section as well. This is a good primer that might spark more ideas to get the creative math juices flowing in the kitchen. There are six full recipes included, each spanning a few pages.



The Eat Your Math Homework book is written toward a young student audience and while they are recipes of a sort, you can also enjoy them by reading them aloud as well. While of course the activity makes it the most fun, some of which we were glad to just read and discuss the possibility of making the recipe. Throughout the book I love how vocabulary words are bolded which highlights them to the student and then we can use the glossary and discuss them further. There is so much learning or review to be done here!

The illustrations are not my personal favorite, but my kids love them and find them to be whimsical and fun. They do invoke excitement and curiosity which is what I think a book like this is absolutely meant to do. Almost all of the ingredients for these recipes are things that we already have on hand or were able to find easily at the standard grocery store and I really appreciate that. As often these days we seem to find experiement books, but lack for the materials. With this book that is not an issue!

My students are tot, junior kindergarten, and second grade and we loved this book. Looking at the math skills that are taught and reinforced I find this book to be a good introduction for them, but it could be good review for others. There are math teasers through out (answers included in the back) and the skills that are gone over include Fibonacci sequence, fractions, tessellations, tangrams, variables and pi, and probability.

With our experience in the past with Charlesbridge, and now this experience with Eat Your Math Homework, I wouldn't hesitate to add Ann McCallum's other Eat Your Homework books to our shelves! Oh and make sure to download the Teacher's Guide from Charlesbridge for even more fun! The TG includes worksheets to go along with the recipes. ;)
You might also be interested in:
Mummy Math
Pete the Cat
Pastry School in Paris



This review was originally posted on Creative Madness Mama.

[Whole And · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edible math! A perfect culinary mathematical experience covering basic concepts such as probability, fractions, Fibonacci patterns, triangles, tessellations and much more. Very practical and memorable applications of the teaching concept. Excellent way to have children understand math deeper and love the process.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh I do like this series. After all, to start with, an algorithm and a recipe are the same thing! Even those folks who don't think they like math or numbers, even if they're all grown-up, would be able to have a lot of fun with this (assuming they carefully work through one chapter at a time, doing all the exercises).

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[Viviane Elbee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This math-based recipe book is great for elementary school students who love math and food! I read this book after checking it out from the library, but I will be putting this book on a list of books to gift to my math-loving nephew!

[Hayden]

Fun recipe book for involving helping kids see value in mathematics.
Use for supplemental activities/homework in math class.

[YingYu Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My son enjoyed reading this book and find all the Fibonacci numbers around.

An awesome book with lots of treats and fun recipe to make!

[Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fun way to introduce a lot of math concepts to young ..and hungry people;)

[Dolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book creatively combines math concepts with different recipes and cooking projects that help children grasp the principles in tangible ways. The narratives are humorous and informative and the cooking projects are simple enough for children to do, although parental supervision is highly recommended.

We really enjoyed reading this book together. I have to admit that we did not tackle any of the projects while reading the book, but the next time we bake brownies, I definitely plan to make a tessellating pattern. We also love learning about the Fibonacci sequence, especially its appearances in nature.

The illustrations are colorful and cartoonish and we had to point out the rabbits' Fibonacci sequence numbers throughout the book. Our girls loved solving the puzzles and were really engaged with the various concepts. Probability trail mix, anyone?

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the recent snowstorm, this book kept my kids happy and entertained, while teaching them math concepts. Doing six very simple recipes (such as fraction chips from tortillas and pizza pi) we ate while talking about how simple math problems could be solved or illustrated with food we eat on a regular basis. The tangram cookies made for interesting shapes, and during a few days, instead of cabin fever we had excitement to learn.

[Mallory White · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic way you can show your students that math is used in everyday life. I love how it doesn't deal with the normal math we see in everyday class such as: time, counting, addition and subtraction. It actually shows us how we can use our math and fractions and measurements and bake and also make yummy foods. We could use this if we ever had a math party or on pie day( turn it into fun with fractions)

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edible math projects support the study of fractions, tesselations, tangrams, pi, and probablity! The math concept is explained in simple terms and then the recipe and directions for using it follow. Each section also includes an Appeteaser! Especially loved the activity and trail mix recipe for explaining probablity.

[Maggie Mattmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cute idea, but I'm not sure how much kids will really get into it. I'm sure they may want to make the delicious treats (who doesn't want yummy brownies?!) but I'm not sure they'd really care much about the math tie ins. There doesn't feel to be much of a connection to push kids to want to do the math along with the munching.

[Margo Dill · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXCELLENT, FUN resource for children to use math at home and learn a bit about cooking, too. I love that these are recipes most kids will actually eat. I also loved the illustrations. They add to the book. The author is planning a series--great idea!

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this one just because it's cool. Now I have to find a kid who wants to do the projects. Any one have a 10 year old to lend?

[Tracie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun way to think about some advanced math concepts: Fibonacci snack sticks, tessellating two-color brownies, variable pizza pi, probability trail mix, etc.

[Lacey Smith]

Super fun book full of tasty recipes for little guys and grown ups alike. a nice way to use measurements in the classroom. It also helps show children how math is truly in everything we do!

[Nativida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Variable Pizza Pi
Tangram Cookies
Fibonacci Snack Sticks
Yum!

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Numbers, math info, recipes. Fun

[Ilib4kids · Rating 2 out of 5]

641.50151 MCC

[Kimberly Wright Oelkers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesomesauce! Math concepts used in cooking. Very clever.

[Mckinley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooking with math, using recipes for food to think about and use math applications.

[Elizabeth Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

So clever! Revisit this book again when Gwyn is 8.

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the concept but I'm not sure a kid would buy into it.