Do all the sweeteners in candy corn leave you interested whether or not it is right for your children? In some ways, it just might be. Candy corn just might boost thinking skills and improve grades! After they get enough, have your children use the sweet treats for some math lessons this Halloween season.
On a very simple level, the orange, yellow, and white segments can help teach colors and shapes. Stir them with some jellybeans for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have children arrange them together to make new shapes.
Would your kids enjoy an exercise that's a little less elementary? 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 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 placed sideways - can be "greater than" or "less than" symbols? Kids would enjoy inequality problems a great deal more when using candy corn for their results.
And what about a couple story problems? Tommy has 25 candy corn pieces. If he gets his brother's 8 pieces, how many will he have now? Since the math story is very versatile, candy corn is still helpful when the complexity is stretched a little. Maybe the children could 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 corn cost? That is a practical math/life problem. Which store charges the best price? Try weighing the candies - or even try weighing the children after they've eaten a few kilos of it!
An enormous jar chock full of these candies offers an excellent guessing/estimation math game. And the whole thing might be handed to the kid with the closest 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 calculations? Hopefully the tasty reward will be suitably motivating.
Some geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The math exercise involves assuming 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 part of the total height each color would occupy, if the Halloween colors were flipped.
Math and candy corn unite in the universe of make believe. Check out the book
The Candy Corn Contest by Patricia Reilly Giff for some interesting reading as well as logic. In the book, a student can't keep from thinking about his class contest. Whoever can guess the right 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.
Now that's brain food! Perhaps candy corn will become the poster candy for educators all over. Not likely. But, perhaps, infusing a little yummy play to a math exercise may encourage thinking and problem solving. It could also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a little more credibility.
