Halloween activities – 13 activities

How well can you predict your candy haul? - Students consider how to determine their best predictions of their candy haul.  The math ideas of measurement error and percent error are introduced.  Students then predict their own Halloween candy collection numbers and compare their predictions to their actual haul using measurement and percent error.

SheetGhostMake 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.

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Collecting the most candy








	





Clicking on any of these images will show them larger in a new window.

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.

We've also added a Halloween bucket volume for yet another challenge. bucket-pic.pdf

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Giant Pumpkins


Let your students marvel at World Record winning giant pumpkins as they use proportions to calculate the quantities of pumpkin puree and the number of pumpkin pies that could be made from one of these giants.  To introduce the task you might show this cool time lapse video of a giant pumpkin from planting to harvest.

BigPumpkins2018.pdf

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I should have invested!


People who have invested their money in the stock markets could have made a lot of money in recent years.  Students use yearly percent increase data to decide which stock: Apple, Disney or Amazon, they should have invested in way back in 2015.

  • What was the net gain of these stocks?
  • How do you figure that?
  • Does the arithmetic or geometric average of those increases equal their total gain or loss over the years?

Middle school students can access this activity by finding percent increases & decreases.  Students can either approximate an annual growth rate or find an exact growth rate by finding the geometric mean of the growth rates. Older students can apply nth roots and write exponential functions to model investment growth over time.  

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Halloween spending 2021

National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics

Every year Americans spend a lot on Halloween and Halloween costumes. In this year of Covid restrictions, the numbers of people planning to go to Halloween parties or trick-or-treating has gone down.  But people are still celebrating the holiday.

Use our current data on Halloween spending in America to engage your students in an analysis of the ratios and percents of population, participation, and money spent in honor of October 31st.  This activity takes kids through finding parts of wholes as well as ratio, percents and proportion problems.  Beware: the tasks in this activity involve some large numbers as well as some challenging fraction/ratio/proportion problems.

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