March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, the day that people wear green, dye their hair green, and squirt food coloring in the toilet to make the water green. People also make green bagels, green beer for the grownups, and so on. You can make your milk green for your cereal in the morning, and green icing for sweets – just take white icing and mix in some food coloring. Remember, food coloring has superpowers: you need only 2-3 drops to tint a whole big bowl of frosting!
Wee ones: Green is one of the colors of the rainbow. The others are red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo and purple. How many other colors is that? Count along with a grownup!
Little kids: If you sneak 3 drops of food coloring into your brother’s cereal and 3 drops into your sister’s cereal, how many drops did you drip? Bonus: How many drops would you put in your own cereal to get to a total of 10 drops?
Big kids: If you have a dozen cupcakes (that’s 12) and put green icing on half of them, how many have green icing? Bonus: If you put 24 cupcakes on a tray in 4 neat rows of 6, and only the cupcakes around the edges get green icing, how many cupcakes are green? What are different ways to figure that out?
Answers:
Wee ones: 6 other colors.
Little kids: 6 drops. Bonus: 4 more, because 6 + 4 = 10.
Big kids: 6 cupcakes. Bonus: 16 cupcakes: 6 in the top row, 6 in the bottom row, then 2 on the left side and 2 more on the right side. Another way to do it: you will have a rectangle in the middle of 2 x 4 = 8 white cupcakes, and can subtract that from 24 to get the rest.
