Even more Halloween ideas

How many houses can you get to – It’s Halloween. Time to trick or treat.  How long will it take you to get to all of these houses?  This is a very open-ended task, counting, trick or treating strategies, distance and more.

Make a ghost costume from a sheet – In this activity young students can reason about the potential of a sheet, cut in a very defined circular shape, becoming a Halloween ghost costume. Notions of head diameter, sheet length, less than and greater than will all come into their reasoning.
Do you want to collect the most candy? – Use your student’s Halloween enthusiasm to do a study on volumes.  We’ve created an activity that asks students to calculate the volume of candy containers that are silly and intriguing.  Skip the cone and the sphere to make this activity more useful for 5th or 6th graders or include the whole activity to challenge with a little bit of percent work.

Vampire bats – We’ve found lots of interesting metric and customary unit facts about Vampire bats and asked students to relate those facts to measurements that they are familiar with.

Candy deals – We found big mixed bags of candy at really good prices … we think.  Students are asked to decide which would be the best deal and the worst deal on candy.  They can also create their own mixed bags.  This activity has unit pricing, philosophy of candy collecting, and Excel if you would like to use technology.

Chocolate and area – In this activity students approximate the volume (through finding the morsel’s base area) of three different pieces of chocolate.  The chocolates are shaped like a heart, a bat (for Halloween) and a chocolate turtle irregular shape.

Cheap-otle? – For Halloween 2016, Chipotle is offering $3 burritos to customer who come in dressed in their Halloween costumes (with something “unnecessary” added) after 5 p.m. on October 31st.  Chipotle will donate up to one million dollars to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation.

• How realistic is it for Chipolte to raise one million dollars?
• What more information would you like to have to decide if this is even possible?

Holiday candy sales – This activity asks students to translate a pie chart of information on candy sales to actual dollars spent for Halloween, Easter, Christmas and Hanuka, and Valentine’s Day.
 Really big pumpkins – Students use proportions to calculate the quantities of pumpkin puree and the number of pumpkin pies that could be made from one of these huge, world record winning pumpkins.

Pumpkin pie – How many pies should I make?  How much of each ingredient will I need? What quantities should I buy at the grocery store?  Engage your students in estimation, multiplication of fractions and proportional reasoning.

Scary costumes – Every year Americans spend lots of money on Halloween and Halloween costumes. Use Brian’s data on Halloween spending in America to engage your students in an analysis of the ratios of population, participation, and money spent in honor of October 31st.

The Ghost Whisperer – This activity isn’t about Halloween but its ghost title might make it appropriate.  Students try to figure out why this magic-seeming crystal ball can always predict correctly.  They create viable arguments to validate their reasoning either through discovering patterns or algebra.  Fun!

from Yummy Math https://www.yummymath.com/2017/__trashed/