Independent craft blog since 2007
Any time I can encourage my kids to read, I’ll jump at the chance. I do my best to follow in my mother’s footsteps and find innovative ways to encourage after-school reading in my family. At our house we use this DIY bookmark as a fun and easy to make an incentive to encourage reading. It was easy to make with simple supplies and some quick hand or machine sewing. It’s easily customized to your child’s favorite character.
When my daughter was young she loved the PBS show “Peg + Cat,” and if you’ve got a fan of that show in your house this activity will be even better, but it doesn’t matter if your kids don’t already know these characters to learn about fractions with pizza.
There’s an episode of “Peg + Cat” where they are working in a pizza place and have to divide pies to put different kinds of toppings of different parts of the pie (there’s also an online game with the same concept, which I can’t believe still exists because my kiddo played it years ago).
Inspired by the episode and a companion book, Nature Homeschool developed an activity for learning about fractions and entrepreneurship using pizza. They developed a pizza shop and used the printables and teaching guide from Teacher Vision to learn more about fractions using pizza as the foundation. Their post also has a pizza order form printable you can use when you role play a pizza shop.
The Inspiration Edit also has some cute printable worksheets using a pizza to learn about fractions. And Life Over Cs has some fun printable pizza fraction activities, such as the printable fraction memory game shown here.
If you want to increase the pretend play factor with this one, you can make a pizza and toppings out of paper, cardboard or felt. Or use a paper plate as your crust and simple shapes cut out of paper to be toppings. The pretend play pizza making kit from Glued to My Crafts uses an individual slice, but you could do the same thing with a whole pie’s worth of slices.
Kids Craft Room has another fun pizza play food idea, this time using salt dough for the crust. The toppings are made out of felt so you can practice putting different toppings on a fraction of the pizza and learn as you play.