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Need something a little
more challenging? 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. Making
spinners from cardboard with the arrows shaped like candy corn
can provide another fun way of working with numbers.
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 if they are using candy for the answers.
And what about some story
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, candy corn is still 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 of candy corn 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 guessing/estimating game. And the
jar will be award to the person with the closest answer. There
is some mathematical way of making a fairly accurate guess. Is
the prize worth the trouble of revisiting some old high school
formulas?
Some 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. Then
again, maybe "enjoy" is too strong a word.
Math and candy corn unite
in the world of fiction. Check out the books Who Brought the
Candy Corn? by Judy Ann Brown and The Candy Corn Contest by
Patricia Reilly Giff for some interesting reading as well as
exercises in logic.
Talk about brain food!
Perhaps candy corn will become the poster candy for educators
everywhere. Not likely. But, hopefully, adding a little tasteful
fun to a math lesson may encourage thinking and learning. It
might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a
little more credence.
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