Burger Math

Since May 28 is National Hamburger Day, try a little burger math with your students. Begin by talking about meatless options to the traditional hamburger such as veggie burgers. Also mention bread-free options to hamburger buns such as lettuce wraps. Then give your students some burger math to solve.

If you have 2 pounds of hamburger, how many burgers can you make if you use 1/4 pound of meat for each burger? (8)

If you want to feed 4 people, how many burgers could each person have? (2) If you make each burger 1/3 pound how many burgers could you make? (6)

Have your students look online to find the cost of 8 hamburger buns and one head of lettuce. Ask the students to find out if it would be less expensive to serve the burgers on buns or lettuce wraps.

If your students have learned to calculate cost per unit, ask them to find out how much one pound of turkey would cost if 5 pounds costs $20.50. ($4.10)

Let your students take a survey of which burgers, sandwiches or toppings their classmates prefer and then make a bar graph showing how many students prefer veggie burgers, hamburgers, turkey burgers, hotdogs, cheeseburgers, hamburger wraps, veggie wraps, etc. Which type of food do most of the students prefer? Which is the class' least favorite?

Give your students a few more food word problems to solve:

Caleb bought 3 pounds of pears,
2 pounds of oranges, 4 pounds
of apples and 5 pounds of carrots.
How many pounds of fruit did he buy? (9)

Andy has 5 eggs, 8 apples
and 2 pears. How many
more apples than eggs does he have? (3)

Here's a problem from the Excel Math Grade 3 Guided Practice:

How many cookies did
Brian and Anna bake? (75)

How many more cookies will
Paige have to bake to equal
what Jose has baked? (25)



Help your students explain their problem-solving strategies as they work through these problems.

Give each student 8 gummy bears or goldfish crackers. (Make sure no students have allergies to these food items.) Ask the student how many they would have if you gave them 3 red gummy bears plus two yellow bears. (13)

Then ask the students to each eat two of their bears or crackers and tell you how many they have left. (6)

Finally, let your students make up some of their own word problems about food and then solve them. Excel Math lessons include lots of practice with word problems of increasing complexity as well as our unique Create A Problem exercises that merge math with literacy.

New to Excel Math? Take a look at the lessons for Kindergarten through Sixth Grade plus lots of math resources at excelmath.com.

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