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Candy Corn Math Ideas
by Gaylene Davis
Does all the sugar in candy corn have you wondering whether or not it is good for your kids? In some ways, it just might be. Candy corn could possibly boost thinking skills and improve grades! After letting them eat their fill, have your kids use the candy corn for some math lessons.
On a very basic level, the orange, yellow, and white triangles can help teach colors and shapes. Mix them with some M & M’s for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have children arrange them to make new shapes.
Need something a little less elementary? Try using the little candies for board game markers. Candy corn bingo is fun – with the numbers on the grid providing answers to equations and the candies marking the spots. Kids can graph different amounts of candy corn.
Have you ever noticed that the little pieces – if turned on their sides – look like "greater than" or "less than" signs? Kids may enjoy unequal equations much more using candy for the answers.
How about some story or word problems? Tommy has 14 pieces of candy corn. If he steals his sister’s 8 pieces, how many will he have in all?
Since the story problem is quite versatile in all lesson plans, the Halloween treats are helpful when the degree of difficulty is stretched a little. Maybe the kids 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! Lucky Tommy.
How much does each individual piece cost? That is a great math/life question. Which store offers the best price? Try weighing the candy corn – or maybe try weighing the children after they have eaten a few bags of it!
An enormous jar full of candy corn provides a great estimating exercise. And the jar could be award to the children with the closest answer. There is some mathematical way of making a fairly accurate guess. Hopefully the sweet candy corn reward will be suitably motivating.
Geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The problem involves pretending the piece of candy is a perfect cone and reconfiguring its color’s dimensions, based on the idea of a perfect cone. With each layer of color being 1/3 the height, determine what fraction of the overall height each color would consume, if the candy corn colors were inverted.
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 student
can't stop thinking about his class contest. Whoever can guess the exact 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! Perhaps these sweets will become the poster food for educators everywhere. Hopefully, adding a little tasteful fun to a mathematics lesson may encourage thinking and learning. Might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a little more credence.
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