I love being in the kitchen with my two cookie monsters. My boys never hesitate to volunteer to help make a mess. My toddler loves to dump pre-measured ingredients into the bowl; my first-grader is a master at driving the Kitchen-aid mixer. When grandma and grandpa were coming for lunch and we needed cookies to go with our ice cream dessert, I recruited my oldest son to help. We whipped up one of my favorite kinds – cowboy cookies. YUM. They have a zillion ingredients, everything delicious (with the exception of peanut butter and m&ms) in one cookie. To sneak in some math practice I made some general ingredient cards. Each has a value; for instance, oats are worth six, sugar has a value of two, etc. Download a 2-page PDF of these cards here. While we waited for the cookies to bake, I told my son to pick three ingredient cards and add the values together. It was so fun to see the combinations of ingredients he came up with (of course, he picked m&ms + chocolate chips + frosting as his first cookie problem; HA!). His reward for a job well done? A cookie, of course!