Increasing and decreasing amounts for a recipe helps to teach your child about proportion and ratios.

What You'll Need

• A recipe and the ingredients to make it

Here's How to Do it Choose a recipe to make with your child. Point out how the recipe is written to yield a certain amount of food. Discuss what you would do if you wanted to increase or decrease the amount of food. Talk about how and why it is important to keep the same ratio of ingredients. Decide if you are going to increase or decrease the recipe. For example, you could decide that you are going to double the recipe. Then have your child recalculate the new amounts for the ingredients.

Updated February 2008