Do all the sweeteners in candy corn have you intrigued whether or not 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 kids use the sweet treats for some math lessons this Halloween season.
On a very basic level, the orange, yellow, and white parts can help teach colors and shapes. Mix them with some jellybeans for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have children rearrange them together to make new shapes.
So you need an exercise that's a bit more challenging? You might try using the tiny candy corn for board game markers. Candy corn bingo sure is great fun - with the numbers on the grid providing answers to equations and the candies marking the spots. Children can graph different amounts of candy corn. Making spinners from cardboard with the arrows shaped like candy corn can provide another fun way of working with numbers.
Have you realized that candy corn - when spun on their sides - can be "greater than" or "less than" symbols? Children might like inequality equations a great deal more if they use candy for the answers.
And what about a few word problems? Tommy has 14 candy corn pieces. If he takes Susie's 12 pieces, how many will he have in all? Since the math story is quite flexible, candy corn is still helpful when the complexity is stretched a little. Maybe the kids could find the square root of the number of pieces of candy corn that Tommy has. Or maybe Tommy's candy corn empire is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy's dentist too...)
How much does a corn cost? That is an excellent math/life question. Which store offers the best price? Try weighing the candies - or maybe try weighing the kids after they've eaten a few pounds of it!
An enormous bucket chock full of candy corn offers a great guessing/estimation math game. And the whole thing might be given to the person with the closest guess. There is some mathematical way of making a pretty accurate guess. Is the prize worth the effort of doing the geometry calculations? Hopefully the sweet candy corn reward 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 1/3 the height, determine what part of the overall height each color would occupy, if the Halloween colors were flipped.
Mathematics 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 keep from thinking about his class contest. Whoever estimates the correct 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 turn into the poster candy for teachers all over. Not likely. But, hopefully, infusing a little yummy fun to a math problem will stimulate thinking and learning. It could also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a little more credibility.