Kitchen Math: Back-to-School Breakfast Recipes

Some say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So there is no better time than those mornings before school to get your kids brains moving and ready for action. Invite your little ones to employ their math skills in the kitchen by helping gyou prepare breakfast. Between calculating quantities, measuring ingredients and more, math plays a vital role in cooking for a full household. Here’s a quick recipe to help get you started -

Quick smoothie recipes
Kicking off the morning with a fruit-filled smoothie with energy generating ingredients and lean protein options can be a great way to start your day. In addition to your oatmeal, pancakes, cereal or other breakfast foods, try blending up this quick and easy smoothie recipe!

Strawberry Banana Smoothie (serves 2)
1 ripe banana
1 ½ cups frozen strawberries
3 tablespoons almond butter
¼ cup vanilla yogurt
2 cups soy milk

Have the kids calculate the amount of ingredients needed according to the number of people in your home and then have them measure them out accordingly before you blend them together. Its a delicious way of incorporating education into everyday routines! Best of all, this recipe was borrowed from JumpStart.com, so be sure to visit the site for more delicious smoothie and breakfast ideas!

Linking Icequakes and Earthquakes

How much do you know about icequakes? The terminology is not nearly as common to hear as ‘earthquakes,’ but in fact the two have some undeniable links. In its most basic form, icequakes or frost quakes are the breaking up on large frozen masses like ice sheets, glaciers and the like. So what does this all mean and how are these things linked? Read on to learn more!

Recent studies have linked the high impact 2010 Chilean earthquakes to noticeable changes in Antarctica in the form of these ice quakes. What makes the link between this case of earthquakes and subsequent icequakes is the 3,000 mile between the two areas. Not Studies since the 8.8 earthquake in 2010 have revealed that the ice in Antarctica is vulnerable to seismic waves even originating from remote locations.

This ripple effect can be explained to young learners through basic cause and affect principles. Learning about links like these can help them understand how science and the environment work through interlocking systems. Ultimately when one major even like high magnitude earth quakes occur, they can still have repercussions thousands of miles away.

Share this bit of knowledge with your kids to spark their interest in science!

Worksheet of the Week

Percentage Printable – Percentage Worksheet for Kids - Math Blaster

Cosmically Cool Crafts for Dad!

Call your Blasters back from the space station to put together an out-of-this-world Father’s Day craft! If you and the kids are not looking to break the bank, visit Math Blaster’s official Pinterest page for ideas on how to surprise dad with something special yet affordable. Best of all, crafting can be a great opportunity to practice basic educational and developmental skills with early learners like your Blasters!

mbfathersdaycrafts

How are you celebrating dad around your home? Do you have any special traditions that you enjoy doing each year? Share some of your favorite craft and activity ideas with us now or start following us for a world of amazing online resources!

Understanding the Origin of Stars

Stars light up the night sky on a daily basis and are for both kids and adults tiny twinkling specimens that are full of mystery. After all how much do you little ones really know about where stars come from and how they illuminate the skies? Scientific study has revealed stars to be collections of atoms floating in space that form carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Under the right conditions stars and even small planets form as a result.

Photo by: epSos.de

To dive deeper into the study of stars and their formation, NASA has just recently sent a flight into a star nursery to properly observe the inner workings of star formations. This will give researchers and scientists the opportunity to see the step by step process of how a star comes to be. The payload sent into space is known as the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph, or CHESS.

This all new technology is allowing us to record details such as the timeline breakdown for the forming of the clouds in space. Sending the CHESS into space also allows NASA to test for sending future satellites into space.

Worksheet of the Week

memorial-day-count-and-circle

The Fly on the Wall

It is easy to dismiss their presence and want to overlook the pesky circling of fruit flies, but these little organisms are actually more complex than they might look. In fact, researchers have recently been studying these bugs to come to a better understanding of their thought process. A team of neuroscientists have observed fluctuations in the time they take to process information before acting on a decision to hypothesize that they actually take a longer amount of time to make what scientists have determined as more difficult decisions.

Photo by: USDAGov

Are these tiny pests of a heightened intelligence than we might have initially thought? That is exactly the question that researchers are hoping to answer as they delve further into their studies. So how exactly are they testing the flies’ decision making skills? Like with any experiment they create a controlled environment testing certain variable options. More specifically they encase the flies in a narrow compartment, pitting two concentrated scents on both ends of a spectrum to see where the flies end up.

As for measuring the difficulty of the decision, scientists varied the distance between the concentrated scents. The closer the concentrations were, the longer the flies took to differentiate and identify to which area they preferred to fly. The consistency of the results, allowed them to conclude that there are links in the system which humans use to make decisions and that of these flies, which is all connected to the FoxP gene. Needless to say, there is more to these flies than meets the eye!

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