Get ready, because this week’s word problem challenge is sweet! If your tutor for math brings up cookies as part of your math help you know the fun is going to be baked right in.

Take a bite out of this delicious word problem, which asks students to practice their elementary school math skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and problem-solving. Take your time working out the answer, and look below when you're ready to check your solution against ours.

Question: Emily is baking cookies. She arranges the cookie dough blobs on a baking sheet in 7 rows. Every even numbered row has 7 cookies, and every odd row has 8. How many cookies does Emily bake?

Solution: The even rows—the 2nd, 4th, and 6th rows—each have 7 cookies. Three rows of 7 cookies have 7 × 3 = 21 cookies. The odd rows—the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th rows—each have 8 cookies. Four rows of 8 cookies have 8 × 4 = 32 cookies. That makes 21 + 32 = 53 cookies in total.

Before we can help our children overcome math anxiety, we must first address any negative feelings that we, as parents, have on the subject. If you have said things in the past like, “I’m not good at math,” or “I don’t like math,” remember that your child is learning this attitude from you. Communicating your discomfort with math may not only increase your child’s anxiety, it could also lower their success and confidence.

First A, then B, then C.

It’s so comforting when events follow a logical progression, and this logic is a wonderfully mathematical concept. Any great math tutoring service will address logical thinking, and our Mathnasium math learning centers help students with their logic skills both inside and outside the classroom.