Can Candy Corn Be Actually Good For Kids? Run The Math And Know For Sure
By: Gaylene Davis

Does all that sugar in candy corn leave you intrigued whether or not it‘s right 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 candy corn for some math lessons this Halloween season.

On a very basic level, the orange, yellow, and white portions can help teach colors and shapes. Mix them with some jellybeans for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have children arrange them together to make new shapes.

So you need something a little more challenging? You might try using the small 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 realized that candy corn - if flipped on their sides - can be “greater than“ and “less than“ signs? Kids may like unequal problems a lot more when using candy for the results.

Now how about a few word problems? Tommy has 20 candy corn pieces. If he takes Susie‘s 20 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 stretched a little. Maybe the children should find the square root of the number of pieces of candy corn that Tommy has. Or maybe Tommy‘s candy corn savings account is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy‘s dentist too...)

How much does a piece of candy corn cost? That is a practical math/life question. Which store offers the best price? Try weighing the candy corn - or maybe try weighing the children after they‘ve eaten a few kilos of it!

A great big bucket chock full of these candies provides a great guessing/estimation math exercise. And the whole thing will be awarded to the person with the best answer. There is some mathematical way of coming up with a fairly accurate guess. Is the candy worth the trouble of doing the geometry math? Hopefully the tasty candy corn reward will be suitably motivating.

Some geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The problem 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 part of the total height each color would consume, if the candy corn colors were inverted.

Mathematics and candy corn unite in the universe of fiction. Check out the book The Candy Corn Contest by Patricia Reilly Giff for some interesting reading as well as logic. In the story, a child can‘t keep from thinking about his class contest. Whoever can guess the total number of 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! Maybe candy corn will turn into the poster candy for teachers worldwide. Not likely. But, maybe, adding a little yummy fun to a math lesson may stimulate thinking and problem solving. It might also give the old excuse “the dog ate my math“ a little more credulity.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Gaylene Davis is an ex-teacher, now a WAHM taking care of her two boys. This candy corn article was originally written for www.Candy-Corn.info‘>www.Candy-Corn.info . For more fun www.candy-corn.info/cc/Candy_Corn_Activity.asp‘>candy corn activities and www.candy-corn.info/cc/Candy_Corn_Facts.asp‘>candy corn facts - check it out.

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