Halloween Math Part 1

Halloween is approaching in a couple of days and its time to look at some math our older students can do.  I get tired of the math being mostly for elementary students so I'm providing information students can use to calculate a series of items.

1. In 2012, $2.4 billion in candy was sold for Halloween.

2. Assume there are 30 pieces of snack sized candy in a bag that sells for $6.00 per bag.

3. Figure out how many bags of candy make up the $2.4 billion.

4. Calculate the number of snack sized candies are sold for  $2.4 billion.

5. If there are 41,131,310 between the ages of 5 and 14, how many pieces of snack sized candy would they each get?

If you prefer having worksheets or more traditional activities, Yummy Math has 12 different activities ready to go. The ones that intrigue me the most are the ones as follows:
1.  Calculating the volume of a variety of bags from rectangular prisms to cones and spheres.

2. One on vampire bats dealing with measurements both customary and metric that students are asked to relate to familiar things.

3.  Based upon given information, students decide which bags of candy are the best buy.

4. Calculating the area of three different shapes of chocolate to determine the best.

5.Students examine Chipolte's fundraiser at Halloween designed to raise $1 million and if its possible.

6. Interpreting a pie graph of holiday sales of candy for several different holidays.

7.  The proportion of pumpkins, puree, and pies using the worlds largest pumpkin.

8.  Calculating the sales of costumes based on population, participation, and money spent.

Finally for today, this web site has a graphic and a listing of candies and their popularity around Halloween time so students can read and interpret data.

Have fun checking these out.  Let me know what you think.