Halloween MATH

With Halloween only two days away, I am wondering how teachers are connecting with their students' interests in this holiday to design engaging Mathematical learning experiences. There are some outstanding children's literature books that provide wonderful connections to mathematical concepts. Some of these include:

These books provide excellent opportunities for students to develop an understanding of the stable order of counting (e.g., 1, 2, 3,) the idea of one more and one less, and growing and shrinking patterns. To begin I have students count either 5 or 10 orange beads (pumpkins) or white beads (ghosts) and have them string these on a black pipe cleaner. Then the students 'act out' the above stories while you read it aloud. I have found this helpful to build students' understanding of one-to-one correspondence. Students also enjoy taking their 'pumpkins' home and retelling the story to their family. 

Last week when I was at the grocery store, I saw some adorable pumpkin chewys that would make excellent counters. Rachel, the author of Stimulating Learning, uses these counters in her recent blogpost. In this post she shares engaging Halloween provocations. Similarly, Sandra Ball has also shared a wealth of outstanding Halloween math related activities on her website. Be sure to check these out!

A new favourite of mine includes And Then Comes Halloween by Tom Brenner. I recently bought it because I loved the simple AB pattern that was woven into the text. Your students will enjoy the predictable pattern in the story. Next you could ask "Can you create a pattern similar to the story?" Students will delight in recreating AB patterns using different Halloween'y materials. On a side note, there are more books in this series, including "And Then Comes Christmas" and "And Then Comes Summer". 

Connecting to patterns, another favourite of mine, is There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Bat. Many students will be familiar with this book but may not realize that the story is representative of a growing pattern. Last year I read this book aloud with the class and together we built the growing pattern and discussed what we noticed and wondered. Following this the students were provided with materials and asked "What growing patterns can you create?" 

And who doesn't think of estimation when Halloween comes around? Many moons ago, some talented educators wrote a resource called Box It or Bag It Mathematics. In this book they share many ideas for estimation and other Mathematical concepts. Here is a link to a past blogpost I wrote about an estimation activity shared in the book, called 'Popcorn Ghost'.

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How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin is a classic. Using a class pumpkin, or individual student pumpkins, students can:
- estimate how many seeds will be in their pumpkin
- use a graph to help them determine how to carve the class pumpkin
- estimate and then measure the circumference of their pumpkin using strings
- estimate and measure the height of their pumpkins using cubes 
​- count the number of lines around the pumpkin

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Pumpkin patches can also provide their own estimation activities! At Back Roads Family Farm Market this year, customers are asked to guess the weight of the giant pumpkin. They provide the smaller pumpkin's weight of 25 pounds as a reference for comparison. I took a picture of my daughter and husband beside the pumpkin so that should I share this image with students, they can better seen the grand size of the pumpkin. 

Fall provides a wonderful backdrop for exploring shapes, beyond just round pumpkins. In Pick A Circle, Gather Squares, A Fall Harvest of Shapes, students can see all the shapes that can be found in the natural environment. In previous years, I have colour copied a few pages from the book, as well as provided pictures from pumpkin patches,  and barns I visited in the past. I place the images in plastic page providers for students to draw on. They can outline the shapes they see with the dry erase markers. When circulating, you can ask the students to describe the shapes they see.

Another fun Halloween book is 2x2 = Boo! This book can be used to explore multiplication. Similar to the classic game Circles and Stars by Marilyn Burns, students can roll two dice and play "Spiders and Webs". Students will need cotton balls or large elastics for the webs and some mini spiders, which can be found at the dollar store this time of the year. The first dice rolled represents the number of webs the students will need to make and the second roll will represent the number of spiders they need to place in each web. They will build these. Then using a whiteboard students can explore writing a "groups of" statement (e.g., 4 groups of 8 spiders is 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 or 4 x 8). Recently I visited some Grade Three classes to engage in Number Talks. I used images of Halloween cookies placed in arrays to spark multiplicative thinking. The students were able to see the equal groupings and made connections between repeated addition and multiplication, as well as the commutative property (e.g., a x b = b x a). I've shared these images under the Instructional Ideas tab so that others may used these and the app Skitch to have similar discussions with their students.   

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Beyond books, teachers can use Halloween items such as candy, cookies, and other items, such as the "Grow Witches"  to prompt Mathematical thinking. For example, last year we used Halloween themed Smartie boxes to explore making tens, estimation, and graphing (see PDF below). And if I had an intermediate class I might use the "Grow Witches"  to inquire about percent. What does percent mean? It says they will grow 600% What might this mean? Let's test it out!

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This is just a small sample of ideas. There are many other Halloween books, including Franklin's Halloween where you could delve into looking at combination problems. Others I'm excited to check out include Bats on Parade and Bat Jamboree! I would love to hear more about your favourite Halloween children's books and any Halloween'y Math lessons you've tried. Please leave some ideas/comments below!