Talk about a fun week of math learning with M&M’s! Below you’ll find all sorts of activities we have done with M&M’s. Most of the ideas could easily be used with other types of candy pieces, too.
Estimation: Fill a jar with M&M’s and ask your children to estimate how many they think are in the jar. The older the child, the bigger the jar should be.
Sorting: Place a pile of M& M’s in front of each child and have them sort the candy into color groups. Older kids can sort according to various attributes, like colors containing red vs. those not containing red, for example. Let them sort as many times as they can think of a new attribute.
Counting: If you have younger children, count and tally the various color groups of M&M’s.
Add/Subtract/Multiply/Divide: Depending on the age/ability of your children, offer various operational problems to your children.
Red + Green =
R + G =
(R + G) x (Y – Bl) =
2(R + G) x 3(Y – Bl) x 12 =
Fair Shares and Division: Invite several stuffed animals over for a party. Divide the M&M’s into fair shares and determine if there are any remainders. Do this several times with varying numbers of “guests”.
Multiplication Arrays: Use the M&M’s to build multiplication arrays. (Not sure what an array is? Visit this site.)
Word Problems: If you have younger children, give oral word problems like, “You have three blue M&M’s and six yellow M&M’s. How many do you have altogether?” Use the M&M’s as manipulatives.
Older children should use the M&M’s to make up their own written word problems.
Mean, Median and Mode: A pile of M&M’s is a great opportunity to practice finding averages, middle numbers and the number occurring most often.
Fractions, Decimals and Percents: Use the pile of M&M’s to decide the fractional part of each color of M&M as compared to the entire group. For example, if you have 5 red M&M’s out of a total group of 25, the fraction would be 5/25 – reduced to 1/5. Transfer the fractions to decimals and percents, too.
Graphing: Make pictographs, bar graphs, comparison graphs, pie graphs, graphs made in a spreadsheet program on your computer. One or all, graphs are great fun. Find a printable M&M’s bar graph here.
Measurement: Use the M&M’s as measuring tools to find the length, width, circumference, radius, perimeter and/or area of various items around the house.
I’d say that’s just about enough math to rival any textbook curriculum for a week, don’t you?
I found some fun sites with other ideas for using M&M’s in your homeschool classroom.
A year or two ago, I created a couple of Valentine’s Day printables for you to enjoy with your children. I thought I’d remind you about them since V-Day is just around the corner. Simply click on the graphics to download.
The Measure of a Heart uses candy hearts to practice measuring perimeter and area. After finishing the worksheet, use your candy hearts to measure the perimeter and area of other things around the house.
(In case you need to know…Perimeter is the measurement around an object and area is the measurement of an object’s surface. To measure the perimeter of the hearts on the worksheet, place candy hearts around the edges of the hearts – the dark lines – and count how many it takes to go all the way around. To measure the area, see how many candy hearts will fit inside the hearts on the worksheet.)
The Candy Pattern worksheet (which didn’t transfer to a jpg well and is MUCH nicer in the PDF download) allows your child to make various patterns using candy hearts.
(In case you need to know…each of the letters on the worksheet (A, B, C) represent a different colored candy heart. So, for instance, an ABA pattern, where A represents pink and B represents green would look like: pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink. Your child gets to decide which colors represent each letter of the pattern.)
You can find several other fun math related V-Day ideas at Googol Learning.
Got candy? We do, and we’re having so much fun using it during living math lessons! This year we added a little science classification to the mix, too. Fun! Fun! Fun!
Math
My preschooler made a concrete graph with his candy.
He had to sort the candy into groups before we could graph them and he created the group names all by himself – gum, chocolate, suckers, crunchy, chewy and hard.
After completing all sorts of averages based on different groupings of the candy, Caleb (6th grade) created this graph using Excel. (This is another great computer integration activity for those of you who’ve asked me to share more about how we use the computer in our homeschool!)
Science
Not a great picture, but I wanted you to see the entire concrete classification system my 6th grader made with his candy. {A classification system is otherwise known as a taxonomy, which we compared to the classification system for plants and animals.}
Beginning with the main group of ‘candy’, Caleb decided how to break the large group into two smaller groups. He came up with ‘chocolate’ and ‘non-chocolate’ as his descriptions.
For each new category, he continued breaking the groups down into two new categories until he ended up with each specific type of candy in it’s own pile.
Finally, we walked through each candy’s “classification”. An example from our taxonomy chart -Candy; chocolate; bright wrappers; made with peanuts; made with peanut butter, crunchy, Butterfinger. Besides being a science activity, this also fits into the category of logic!
Check out some other candy math lessons we’ve posted in the past, too!
Hubby and I celebrated Valentine’s Day on Saturday, so I decided to do a family Valentine’s Day celebration on Friday. To get the excitement rolling, we ditched the math books and used little sweethearts to create graphs and find the mean, median and mode of candy that I gave them.
We spent much of the afternoon preparing for a special dinner of -
Heart Pizza
Lemon-Strawberry Slushies
and Heart-shaped Ice Cream Cookies
We finished off the night by watching the Charlie Brown Valentine special from earlier in the week. I’m not a huge Charlie Brown fan, but the kids loved it!
At church Sunday, the Jr. Church lessons focused on, of course, LOVE.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12:30-31
We played some fun games after the lesson, too.
Pinky Linky
Candy Heart Relay
Blindfolded Coloring
Candy Heart Memory Circle
And, we kept on celebrating Monday at co-op with the annual Valentine’s parties.
There was so much love shared that I think we’re all caught up for awhile! LOL Hope your V-Day was special!
October/November = lots of falling leaves and lots of candy. What better to do with both of those things? Math, of course!
Whether you have extra M&M’s, Skittles, Smarties, Runts, or just a big bunch of assorted candy bars, take a few minutes to turn those sweets into more than cavities. Even little bitty ones can sort candy, place the pieces on a blank grid, then color a bar graph. As the kiddos get bigger, all the more fun they can have graphing their candy. Click here to check out my candy math ideas!
And don’t forget all those autumn leaves! Make a nature walk even more productive by collecting a sack of leaves to sort and graph.
Literal or concrete graphs are not only fun, but help younger ones understand better what a graph on paper represents.
After making the concrete graphs, my children jotted the information and used centimeter grid paper to design their own graphs.
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