Does all the sugar in candy corn have you curious 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 letting them eat their fill, have your children use the candy corn for some math exercises this Halloween season.



On a very basic level, the orange, yellow, and white triangles can help teach colors and shapes. Stir them with some M&M's for a fine motor skills exercise for little fingers. Have children rearrange them together to make new shapes.

Need an exercise that's a bit more challenging? You could try using the small candies for board game markers. Candy corn bingo can be a lot of 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 seen that the little pieces - if spun on their sides - can be "greater than" and "less than" signs? Children may enjoy inequality equations much more when they are using candy corn for their results.

Next, how about a few story problems? Tommy has 20 candy corn pieces. If he is given his brother's 12 pieces, how many will he have now? Since the story problem is very flexible, candy corn is still helpful when the complexity is enhanced. 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 empire is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy's dentist too...)

How much does each piece of candy corn cost? That is a practical math/life question. Which store charges the best price? Try weighing the candies - or even try weighing the children after they have eaten a few pounds of it!

An enormous bottle brimming with the sweet little rascals offers a great guessing/estimation math exercise. And the whole thing will be awarded to the kid with the best answer. There is some mathematical way of making a fairly accurate estimate. Is the prize worth the effort of doing the geometry math? Hopefully the sweet 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 piece of candy 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 Halloween colors were flipped.

Mathematics and candy corn unite in the universe of fiction. Check out the book by Patricia Reilly Giff for some interesting reading and logic. In the story, a student can't stop thinking about his class contest. Whoever estimates the total number of candy corn 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.

Now that's brain food! Perhaps candy corn will turn into the poster candy for educators worldwide. Not likely. But, hopefully, infusing a little yummy fun to a math lesson may encourage thinking and learning. It might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my math" a bit more credibility.