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Do all the sweeteners in candy corn have you intrigued whether or not it is good for your kids? In some ways, it just might be. Candy corn could possibly boost thinking skills and improve grades! After they've had plenty, have your children use the candy corn for some math lessons this Halloween season.

On a very simple level, the orange, yellow, and white parts can help teach colors and shapes. Stir them with some M&M's for a sorting exercise for little fingers. Have the kids rearrange them together to make new shapes.

Need an exercise that's a little tougher? Try using the tiny candy corn for board game markers. Candy corn bingo can be great fun - with the numbers on the grid providing answers to equations and the candies marking the spots. Kids can graph different amounts of the candy. Making spinners from cardboard with the arrows shaped like candy corn can provide another fun way of working with numbers.

Have you seen that the little pieces - after turned on their sides - look like "greater than" or "less than" symbols? Kids would enjoy unequal problems a great deal more if working with candy for their answers.

Now how about some word problems? Tommy has 25 candy corn pieces. If he is given his brother's 12 pieces, how many will he have now? Since the math story is quite flexible, candy corn is still helpful when the degree of difficulty is enhanced. Perhaps the children could find the square root of the number of pieces of candy corn that Tommy has. Or maybe Tommy's candy corn savings account is going to grow exponentially over the entire month of October until Halloween! Lucky Tommy. (And Tommy's dentist too...)

How much does an individual piece cost? That is a great math/life question. Which store charges the best price? Try weighing the candy corn - or even try weighing the children after they've eaten a few bags of it!

A huge bottle brimming with these candies offers a great guessing/estimating math exercise. And the whole thing might be handed to the kid with the best answer. There is some mathematical way of coming up with a pretty accurate estimate. Is the prize worth the trouble of doing the geometry calculations? Hopefully the sweet reward will be effectively motivating.

Some geometry students might enjoy the Internet Math Challenge from the University of Idaho. The math exercise involves assuming the piece of candy is a perfect cone and reconfiguring its color's dimensions. With each stripe of color being 1/3 the height, determine what part of the total height each color would occupy, if the candy corn colors were flipped.

Mathematics and candy corn unite in the world of imagination. Check out the book The Candy Corn Contest by Patricia Reilly Giff for some fun reading as well as exercises in logic. In the book, a student can't stop thinking about his class contest. Whoever can guess the total number of candies in the jar gets to keep them all. The only catch is that each guess requires the kid to read a page of a library book.

Now that's brain food! Maybe candy corn will turn into the poster candy for educators everywhere. Not likely. But, maybe, adding a little tasty play to a math exercise may encourage thinking and learning. It might also give the old excuse "the dog ate my homework" a little more confidence.

This Parenting article is provided by Articleteller - The Free Article Directory http://www.articleteller.com

Gaylene Davis is an ex-teacher, now a WAHM taking care of her two boys. This candy corn article was originally written for www.Candy-Corn.info . For more fun candy corn activities and candy corn facts - check it out.

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