candy math
If you have leftover Halloween (or Easter or Christmas) candy, use it for some fun math practice! Here are a few suggestions:
- Sort the candy by type, color, or other categories
- Make a graph
- Group the candy into sets and practice counting by 1s, 2s, 3s, 5s, or 10s
- Do greater-than and less-than comparisons
- Find sums of two different types of candy and the difference between one type of candy and another
- For older students, find the mean, median, and mode
- Find the percentage of each type or color of the whole candy stash
We dumped out all of our candy and decided to sort it into the following categories:
-suckers
-chocolate bites/rolls/drops
-candy bars
-gum
-chewy candy (not chocolate)
-hard candy
-Smarties
We then sorted and counted each piece of candy and made tally marks for each category. I modified this worksheet to match our categories, and we filled it out together. We then sorted all the candy into piles of five, and my daughter counted by fives to find the total number. I modified this graphing worksheet to match our category designations. We unwrapped all the Smarties candies and sorted them by color, arranging them into a graph (albeit not a straight, precise one). Finally, because we had several packages of Smarties Money (larger Smarties with different dollar and cent amounts stamped on top), we added up the total amount of Smarties Money in our pile ($71.86!).
Quote of the Morning: “All this candy sorting is making me hungry!”
You could also do this activity while making gingerbread houses or at any other time of year. What other math activities have you done using candy?
Other Resources:
Candy Coated Classroom Activities
We also really liked Loreen Leedy’s fun children’s book, The Great Graph Contest, which shows different types of graphs and how they’re used.
Great fun!
We don’t use a formal math curriculum with our children at this stage (grade one), and this sort of thing is right up our alley. You asked what we’ve done with candy for math lessons. The other day we were eating those yummy mellow pumpkins, jellybeans leftovers from a birthday, and some candy corn. I told the girls (ages 5.5 and almost 7) that I’d give them each 20 jellybeans. If they wanted candy corn or pumpkins, they had to “buy” them with the jellybeans. Each candy corn was worth 2 jellybeans and each pumpkin was worth 5 jellybeans. I think my oldest wound up with 3 pumpkins, 2 candy corns, and 1 jellybean, for instance. We talked about how everyone’s total (including mine, yum) was 20, no matter what the candy combination was. Cute. Thanks for the enjoyable carnival post! 
Great idea, JacciM–it’s like candy algebra! I’m always looking for fun ways to illustrate math concepts and will have to try that one.