Does all that sugar in candy corn have you interested if it is good for your children? In some ways, it just might be. Candy corn just might boost thinking skills and improve grades! After they've had plenty, have your children use the sweet treats for some math lessons this Halloween season.
On a very simple level, the orange, yellow, and white portions can help teach colors and shapes. Stir them with some M&M's for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have children arrange them together to make new shapes.
Could you use an exercise that's a smidge more challenging? You could try using the little candies for board game markers. Candy corn bingo can be great fun - with the numbers on the grid providing answers to equations and the candies marking the spots. Kids can graph different amounts of the candy. Making spinners from cardboard with the arrows shaped like candy corn can provide another fun way of working with numbers.
Have you seen that the little pieces - if placed sideways - can be "greater than" or "less than" symbols? Kids may enjoy inequality problems a great deal more when using candy for their results.
Next, what about a few story problems? Tommy has 25 pieces of candy corn. If he steals his sister's 12 pieces, how many will he have now? Since the math story is very versatile, candy corn is still helpful when the degree of difficulty is enhanced. Perhaps the children should find the square root of the number of pieces of candy corn that Tommy has. Or maybe Tommy's stash of candy corn is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy's dentist too...)
How many cents does each piece cost? That is an excellent math/life question. Which store charges the best price? Try weighing the candy corn - or maybe try weighing the children after they have eaten a few pounds of it!
A huge bottle full of the sweet little rascals offers a great guessing/estimation math game. And the whole thing will be given to the child with the best answer. There is some mathematical way of coming up with a fairly accurate guess. Is the candy worth the trouble of working through the geometry math? Hopefully the tasty candy corn prize will be appropriately motivating.
Some geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The challenge involves pretending the candy corn is a perfect cone and reconfiguring its color's dimensions. With each layer of color being a third the height, determine what fraction of the total height each color would occupy, if the candy corn colors were flipped.
Math and candy corn unite in the world of make believe. Check out the book
The Candy Corn Contest by Patricia Reilly Giff for some interesting reading as well as exercises in logic. In the book, a child can't stop thinking about his class contest. Whoever guesses the total number of yellow-and-orange candies in the jar gets to keep them all. The only catch is that each guess requires the student to read a page of a library book.
Talk about brain food! Maybe candy corn will become the poster candy for teachers worldwide. Not likely. But, hopefully, adding a little tasteful play to a math exercise will encourage thinking and learning. It might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a little more credence.
Gaylene Davis is an ex-teacher, now a WAHM taking care of her two boys. This candy corn article was originally written for
http://www.Candy-Corn.info . For more fun
candy corn activities and
candy corn facts - check it out.
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