Math Game for Sandwich Day

In case you don’t know it yet, today, Nov 3rd, is the National Sandwich Day. Not to brag, but I found out about this awesome holiday yesterday, when I picked up a book that has daily thematic learning activities for children.

As I was flipping through the book, I noticed that thematic math activities in it were a bit on the boring side. Think I’m exaggerating?  See for yourself:

For the Sandwich Day, the book suggests two activities

1. Assigning monetary values to each ingredient, then calculating the total cost of a sandwich

2. Creating a bar graph of favorite kinds of sandwiches.

I’m not saying these activities are of no value. I’m just saying c’mon, let’s make Sandwich Day math more interesting and accessible to young children, but still of interest to older kids as well as to parents.

So this is what I’ve done today – I drew a Sandwich Day Table that showed possible combinations of 3 fillings and 3 condiments. First, we created all different sandwich combinations. Then we chose our favorites. Then we asked a few friends to pick a cell in the table and told them what their sandwich of the day was going to be. Oh yeah, we even got to make our favorite sandwiches – a PB&J with bananas.

Other Sandwich Day games could include finding iconic numbers in various sandwiches (for example, 1 for wraps, 2 for BLT, 3 for Big Mac). Or maybe turning sandwich making into a functions game. What other Sandwich Day math games can we play?