Pumpkin Pi: Ways to Practice Math with Halloween Treats

American families have all sorts of Halloween traditions, some like to carve pumpkins and go to corn mazes, others like to go to haunted houses and house parties to show off their Thriller moves, and some of us, well, we just like dressing up and going out for some good ole fashioned trick-or-treating fun. Like with many activities in life, there are many ways to work on improving yours kids’ math skills by using your surroundings, and trick-or-treating candy isn’t excluded. Various math concepts easily lend themselves to treats. 

Classifying and sorting are two critical math skills and probably the most obvious skills that can be done with Halloween treats, but you can go much farther with it, like charting your results. From preschool to high school, kids generally love candy and use it some way or another like a currency. High schoolers are usually far beyond just sorting and categorizing candy, but some of the ideas below can be used for any age. With that said, let’s explore some ways to improve math skills with Halloween candy.

Simple Math Ideas with Halloween Candy

• Describe and compare candy shapes
• Compare the candy via ingredients, greater than, less than, shape and size
• Add all the candy in each category up
• Subtract all the candy when you make new categories (or when you eat the candy!)
• Describe special relationships like sphere vs. cube or thin vs. thick
• Measure candy length by using a candy unit, like candy corns. For example, one Blow-Pop equals the length of three candy corns. Or one mini Snickers bar equals the length of one candy corn. 
• Advanced count by 2s, 5s and 10s
• Chart the findings to show the results of each kids comparisons. Comparing them to other charts of siblings or friends is great practice too. 

By doing the activities above, kids are practicing pattern recognition, comparisons, geometry, classification and advanced counting. 

Halloween Trick-or-Treat Memory Activity

Another activity that goes beyond just the candy is something that boosts memory skills, is to have kids either perform or answer a trivia question for a treat. When kids come trick-or-treating to the door, you can ask them to sing a small song or ask them to guess how many months it takes to grow a pumpkin, or the name of the world’s largest spider. For songs, you might have to help jog their memory by naming some popular kids songs like the ABC Song, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or Skip to My Lou, but they helping them and dancing with them will likely make them laugh, as well as their friends. And who doesn’t want to learn more trivia? Perhaps if they get a trivia question right, they get 2 pieces of candy!

Halloween Scavenger Hunt Activity

Remember the old Slug Bug game? Or perhaps you’ve played “I Spy with My Little Eye” games with your kids. This game is sort of like those, where kids get to use their spidey senses (if we may) to pick out patterns while trick-or-treating. First, have the kids you’re trick-or-treating with or ones who are going out in a group on their own guess the following things:

1. What is the most common costume seen trick-or-treating?
2. How many kids dressed up as princesses will you see?
3. How many kids dressed up as zombies will you see?
4. Which house has the most/best Halloween decorations?
5. Which house has the most pumpkins outside?
6. How many pumpkins will you see? 

If you want to get specific, each kid can be responsible for keeping track of one item, say, total number of zombies. For extra bonus points, you can print out a map of the area the kids will be trick-or-treating in. As they go along the way, they can mark specific costumes they saw, or who had the best Halloween decorated house. Pointing out and remembering all things they see is great for memory, and mapping those things is great for building special awareness. Lastly, writing down all of the numbers of things the kids tracked and doing some simple statistics and ratios for things like most popular costume is a great way to tie Halloween to number sense, and how numbers relate to real situations. 

Candy Give/Buy Back Activities

Lastly, candy is delicious to many people, especially kids, but, let’s be real: it isn’t the healthiest food for any of us. For those of us who are sugar conscientious and try to remove that temptation from our households as much as possible, we have a few plans to stop your kids from eating Halloween candy all the way until December! 

1. The Sugar Sprite Fairy. She’s someone who visits houses of girls and boys who are willing to give up their candy in exchange for a toy. Have your child pick out 3 – 5 of their favorite pieces of candy for them to have 1 each day for a few days. Then have then Sugar Sprite Fairy take the rest. Afterall, sugar helps her fly!
2. Pay your kids a set amount of money for every piece they surrender to you. Say, $.05 - $.10/candy. So you’re buying the candy from them. Here you can practice math skills again by having your kids figure out how much the candy they’ve gathered is worth. Knowing it’s total worth, they can decide how much to give back vs. keep and perhaps start saving or adding to other savings they have for something they want. The bought candy can then go to your work for you to make friends and perhaps enemies.  

Are you planning on trick-or-treating with your kids this year? Do you have a certain family Halloween tradition to celebrate the festivities? Share it with us!