Six ways to have fun with Half-term Halloween maths
The half-term break from school doesn't need to be a break from learning - for kids, everything is a learning experience and as parents we can both maximise it and make the learning fun.
1. Creepy Counting
Counting shouldn't be underestimated as an important skill for young learners - it really is the foundation of numeracy upon which all the other maths skills are based. Whatever age or ability of your child, you can tweak the following ideas to make them work for you. Take a Halloween walk and count the pumpkins, skeletons, witches or whatever spooky decorations people have decorated their houses with. For older children, use a tally chart to count as you go and then they can draw it as a spooky graph when you get home.
If Halloween isn't a thing in your area, go for a nature hunt in your nearest park and count the autumnal things you find - conkers, acorns, beechnuts or red, orange and brown leaves.
2. Kooky contours
Pumpkin carving has reached new levels of intricacy in recent years, but if like me, you're less adept with a knife, you might find your pumpkin ends up with square eyes and a triangle nose - there's nothing wrong with this as it's perfect for introducing young kids to shapes!
3. Spooky sorting
After an evening of trick or treating, the Halloween sweet haul is a great way to practice sorting. You can sort by colour, type, flavour, size - whatever categories you can think of. Sorting teaches children to look for similarities and differences and categorise things appropriately, which is another important mathematical foundation.
4. Hocus pocus patterns
Learning about patterns helps kids understand order and make predictions about what might come next. This is an important foundation maths skill which is one of the first steps in helping children develop their ability to make educated guesses, logical connections and, in turn, more complex reasoning skills. Have an autumnal treasure hunt, and make sequences and patterns with what you find.
5. Beastly baking
Baking is a great way of practicing mathematical skills with your children, whatever their level. Check out our Halloween baking blog which shows how parents can maximise the maths in baking (and use up some of that excess Halloween chocolate!)
6. Little monsters activity
This spooky maths activity of ours is a firm favourite - younger children can have fun finding and counting, and older kids (and even adults!) can test their maths with our creepy calculations and petrifying picture puzzles.
Have a fun, learning-filled October break!
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