Do all the sweeteners in candy corn leave you wondering if it is right 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 sweet treats for some math exercises 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 fine motor skills exercise for little fingers. Have the kids arrange them together to make new shapes.

Would your kids enjoy something a smidge less elementary? You might try using the small candy corn 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 seen that candy corn - when turned on their sides - look like "greater than" or "less than" signs? Kids may enjoy unequal math a great deal more when they use candy for the answers.

Next, what about a couple story problems? Tommy has 14 pieces of candy corn. If he gets his sister's 8 pieces, how many will he have now? Since the math story is quite versatile, candy corn is still helpful when the degree of difficulty is enhanced. 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 savings account is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy's dentist too...)

How much money does each individual piece cost? That is a great math/life question. Which store charges the best price? Try weighing the candy corn - or maybe try weighing the kids after they have devoured a few pounds of it!

An enormous bucket brimming with the sweet little rascals offers an excellent guessing/estimation math exercise. And the whole thing could be handed to the child with the closest answer. There is some mathematical way of coming up with a pretty accurate guess. Is the candy worth the effort of working through the geometry calculations? Hopefully the sweet reward will be appropriately motivating.

Some geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The problem involves assuming the piece of candy is a perfect cone and reconfiguring its color's dimensions. With each layer of color being 1/3 the height, determine what fraction of the overall height each color would consume, if the Halloween colors were flipped.

Mathematics and candy corn unite in the universe of fiction. Check out the book The Candy Corn Contestby 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 guesses the correct number of candies in the jar gets to keep them all. The only catch is that each guess requires the kid to read a page of a library book.

Talk about brain food! Maybe candy corn will become the poster candy for educators all over. Not likely. But, perhaps, adding a little yummy fun to a math exercise may stimulate thinking and problem solving. It might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my math" a bit more credence.