Your Kid Loves Cooking? They're Already Doing Pre-Algebra

If your student spends more time in the kitchen than at a desk, good news: they've been practicing pre-algebra the whole time without knowing it.

Recipes are ratio and proportion problems wearing an apron. Every time a recipe gets scaled up for a bigger group or scaled down for a smaller one, that's a proportion. Every time a recipe gets halved and a fraction needs adjusting, that's fraction operations. Every time a grocery store sale changes a price, that's percent. Kids who cook have already built number sense for all of this. They just haven't been shown that it's math yet.

This is exactly why my pre-algebra class rotates through real contexts instead of staying locked into one theme all year. A kid who lights up over a recipe card is going to engage with a ratio problem framed as a recipe a lot faster than the same problem framed as "solve for x."

Here's a free sample worksheet with six cooking-based pre-algebra problems, spanning ratios, proportions, fractions, and percent. It's a taste of the range covered across the year, not the full homework set your student would get in class.
If this is the kind of math your kid could actually get excited about, that's the whole point of how this class is built.