Introducing money to younger children is always an exciting opportunity to present math in a new way. Kids Math Teacher is known for providing child-friendly menus to present this math material to young children. The Pancake Menu Ultimate Fun Pack provides families with a variety of recipes and tools to turn this lesson into a hands-on educational feast. Each pack includes The Pancake Menu book, menu money, ordering sheets, apron, and a spatula. This set is available solely on the company's website for $55.

The Pancake Menu is a hardcover, spiral-bound book that is noted as the first menu book for kids. All pages are laminated, have colorful borders, and most of the pages fold out to reveal content. The first foldout shows cooking safety, cleaning tips, supply lists, as well as recipes for homemade whipped cream and pancake batter. There are 12 recipes included within the remaining six-page foldouts.  Each recipe provides detailed instructions on how to use the homemade pancake batter recipe to cook creative and decorated meals. Little add-ins like food coloring, cocoa powder, and candy help create a snail, star, ladybug, tarantula, sword, or heart-shaped pancakes. Pairing the homemade whipped cream recipe with fruit or candy creates tasty sweet-and-sour, kooky faced, flying saucer, or the famous overstuffed pancake.

The Menu Money & Ordering Play Pack is used to take family orders and pay for meals. Each money set includes ten $1 bills as well as five $20, $10, and $5 bills. There are cards with eight of each coin that needs to be cut into squares. All the money is double-sided printed on colored cardstock and laminated. Six paper ordering sheets and two pencils are also stored in a clear pouch. A red apron and blue plastic spatula complete this set. The apron is washable and includes the Kids Menu Books logo imprinted on the front. The spatula is made of nylon plastic and has a handle rest to keep it from touching the counter.

We used this menu to create each of the 12 pancake designs with our children. Our oldest was in charge of preparing the food while our little ones took the order. After eating, our younger two presented the bill and we paid with the menu money. Our entire family enjoyed this hands-on math and restaurant experience. The products helped make money math easy to understand and turned out to be hours of fun! All the products were of high quality but I decided to laminate the ordering sheets so we could reuse them. I think laminating the sheets and replacing the pencils with a dry erase marker would be a fantastic way to enhance the set.

The Pancake Menu Ultimate Fun Pack not only introduces children to society's way of buying and selling, but you are also encouraging ideas for early entrepreneurship. Having your older children lead the kitchen duties is a wonderful way for them to practice leadership and management skills. We recommend this set for families with children ages 5 to 10. This kit turned our kitchen into a freestyle, pancake scented, math classroom and to my elementary children, nothing is better than that.

-Product review by Ta'Neisha Kemp, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April 2020