If you’re looking for a way to get your little one excited about learning math, these candy-based ideas are definitely ones you want to try!
No matter what holiday you celebrate, if your kiddo has anywhere near the amount of candy as mine does afterward, you have the perfect opportunity to use these delicious treats to power their brain as well as their blood sugar!
This article is the first in a series that breaks down tons of fun ways to get your kiddo mathematically thinking before they get to munching. Please note that while approximate ages are suggested, you should always follow your child’s specific developmental needs, regardless of their actual age. Meet them where they are ready to learn, and they will grow from there!
Math concepts in early childhood go way beyond simply reciting numbers when counting. There are other important concepts that children need to develop a baseline for during these years, before they encounter more difficult concepts later in school. These include sorting, classifying, counting with one-to-one correspondence, understanding quantities, estimation, patterns, and graphing, just to name a few!
How to build math understanding with fun, easy activities:
1. Sorting
Ask your child to sort candies by color and hand you all of the candies that are “yellow” or “azul.”
- If they are ready for a challenge, ask them how they could sort all of the candies in the pile.
- If they can sort in one way (such as by color or type), ask them to sort another way.
Find all of the same types of candies
- If they give different candies, talk about how you know when candies are the same and when they are different by what you can see, feel, or taste.
Play a matching game– you choose different types of candies or colors of the same candy and line them up. Then, mix up the remaining options and ask them to find a match to the candies you lined up.
- If they are ready for a challenge, ask them to find a candy that does not match and ask them to explain how they know the candies are different.
2. Counting, One-to-One Correspondence, and Quantity
Start by asking your child to help you count a small number of candies, such as a number between 1 and 5.
- If they are ready for a challenge, ask them to count higher numbers, such as 6-10, then 11-15, and later 16-20.
- When they are counting, make sure they place a finger on each object they count, or move one object to another location while saying the number.
- If they are not able to do this by themselves yet, ask them to say the number when you touch the object. This helps them learn that each object must be counted and that numbers go with one item at a time.
Ask your child to give you a specific number of candies. “Can you give me 3 candies?” “Can you give me 11 candies?”
- After they finish handing you the requested amount, ask them, “How many candies was that?” The point of this question is to ensure they understand that the total number of candies is the last number they counted, not to recount all of the candies again.
- Make two piles of candies with different amounts in each pile. Ask your child which group has more or fewer candies.
**Fun fact (#SuperNerdsUnite)- There is a very common phenomenon that (almost) all kids go through when it comes to understanding quantities. If you have two piles with the same number of items, but one pile is more spread out than the other, most children will say that the spread-out pile has more than the other pile. Even if you count both piles together and say, “We counted, and both piles have 5 candies. Which pile is bigger?” Most kids will still say the spread-out pile. They haven’t developed the ability to understand that the quantity remains the same, even when the piles look different.
If your child can identify the candy pile with more or less correctly, ask them, “How do you know that one has more?” See if their response talks about one pile looking bigger/smaller than the other, or if they reply with something like, “Because this pile has 5 and this one has 3. Five is a bigger number.”
3. Estimation with Candy
Put a small number of candies in a pile and ask your child to guess how many candies there are without counting.
- For an added challenge, put the candies into another object, such as a glass or the back of a toy pickup truck. How they see a quantity changes based on the container.
Set out a few objects that can serve as containers, such as a plastic egg, a toy pickup truck, a small bowl, or a small bottle cap. Ask your child to guess how many candies they think will fit inside that object. Then, help your child count as they put the candies inside.
- If they are ready for a challenge, you can ask them about the number they guessed and how many candies actually fit. Was their guess correct? Were the numbers close? What had the bigger number- their guess or how many actually fit?
4. Patterns with Candy
First, create a basic AB pattern (that means two things that repeat, such as “red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, …”). Then ask your child to name the colors as you point to the candies.
If they are ready for a challenge, ask them what color candy would come next if we wanted to put one more in the line. Sometimes, it helps kids to say the whole pattern again, but at the end, move your finger into the next empty space. What typically happens is that their brain wants to keep going and will automatically say the next color that should appear, since it has just heard the pattern.
Ask your child to create their own AB pattern using different colors/candies than you previously modeled.
- (Only try this next option if the two previous ideas could be done independently.) Create an AAB or ABC pattern and repeat the two previous ideas.
- AAB means “red, red, blue, red, red, blue, red, red, blue…”
- ABC means “red, blue, green, red, blue, green, red, blue, green…”
5. Graphing
Before we get to the graphing fun, we have to do some data collection first! In this article, I talk about a candy-tasting activity that led to some serious graphing with my older kiddo. Here’s how you can do the same thing with a younger kiddo:
- Keep the options limited- even something as fun as eating candy will get boring to a young child after a while. Choose 4-5 types of candy at the most.
- Keep questions easy to answer- while we do want kids to use a lot of language during this critical developmental period, using yes/no questions helps to keep them moving along in this activity. Here are some suggestions:
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- Do you think it looks fancy?
- Did it have chocolate?
- Did you like the flavor?
- Would you want to eat it again?
- Was it an egg shape?
- Was it a square shape?
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- Write out the questions for your child, where they can either watch you record their answers or attempt writing on their own.
- Remember that fun fact from earlier? That is a key piece of information when starting graphs with young children. Since they can look at two identical quantities and believe one pile has a different amount just because of how the piles are laid out, simply lining up candies won’t work.
An easy remedy is to create a quick graph. Using a piece of paper (or the back of junk mail, we’re not judging), create a bunch of boxes that look like this:
- Using the graph paper, ask your child to help you line up all the red candies, with each candy in its own box. Then ask them to do the same thing with the blue candies. Once they are lined up and equally spaced out, ask your child what they notice. “Which candy color do we have the most of? Are there any candies that have the same amount?”
- If they are ready for a challenge, ask them to help figure out how many more red candies they would need to have the same amount of blue candies. (They will be counting the empty boxes between where red ends and blue ends.)
- Another activity is to create a graph together. You will start by creating a few vertical lines and one horizontal line on a piece of paper that looks like this:
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- Then place one of each candy color at the bottom. Now you are ready to ask your child to help you count how many of each color you have. After they count one color, help them create a dot or an X above that color of candy, as shown above.
- Dots are the easiest mark a child can create, X’s are a little trickier, but really, as long as they make a mark while counting, that is the most important idea for this activity.
- Now you can ask some more questions, such as, “Which candy has 2 X’s? Which candy has none? I see you put 3 X’s for the green candy, and you have 3 green candies in this pile we counted; what is that word when they match? (same)”
These math activities can be repeated with any type of food at mealtimes or with toys during playtime. The more times your child practices these concepts over and over again, the more their brain is grasping these essential foundational math concepts! Have a tasty time together!
