11 Awesome Math Halloween Activities Your Class Will Love

Halloween is a tricky time in middle school.  Some kids are disappointed to find out there are no longer going to be Halloween parties at school, but most kids are still excited that it's coming! If you're wanting something fun to do on Halloween, but know that you need to keep your class learning, here are some fun Halloween ideas for a middle school math classroom.

Here's some fun Halloween math ideas:

1.) Plan a haunted road trip.  Have students research the top haunted sites in the US (or provide them with a list).  Have students choose 3 haunted sites, and plan a road trip to visit.  While planning the road trip, there is tons of math you could incorporate.  Students could use unit rates to plan the amount of gas needed for the trip, use percents to figure the price of lodging including tax, or use equations to figure time spent driving just to name a few ideas.
2.)  Make a Halloween party menu and grocery list.  Have students plan a menu for a Halloween party for 25 guests, and then make a grocery list for their menu. Students will use proportional reasoning to scale recipes up to serve 25, and fractions as they combine the ingredients from all of the recipes into one grocery list.
3.) Practice ratios and logic with a witches' brew.  Perhaps your students would enjoy using logic, clues, and ratios to create the perfect recipe for a witches' brew.  Make up a fake recipe using spooky ingredients like spider legs and dragon scales but leave some of the amounts blank.  Then give students clues like this, "The ratio of dragon scales to spider legs is equivalent to the ratio of snake venom to toe of frog", or "The amounts of wolfsbane is 50% more than the amount of adder's fork".  If this sounds like the perfect Halloween activity for your class but you don't have time to put it together, you can check out this Halloween ratio activity in my store.

4.)  Compare ratios of different types of candy.  Get a bag of mixed types of Halloween candy.  Classify the different types of candy in the bag.  Have students use ratios, fraction and percents to write comparison statements about different types of Halloween candy.  For example, students could write statements such as the ratio of hard candy to fruity candy is 5:3, or 32% of Halloween candy is chocolate.
5.)  Guess what's in the bag.  A fun activity that I like to use to introduce probability is Guess What's In the Bag.  You could do a Halloween version of this.  Begin by putting 15-20 pieces of different types of candy in a paper bag.  Tell students what types of candy are in the bag, but not the exact amounts.  Each hour draw out one piece of candy and record on a chart what type of candy you drew.  Then have students guess what is in the bag (I had them submit their guesses on a Google Form).  Do this over several days, and see how students guesses get closer to the actual values of each type of candy.  This is a great way to introduce experimental versus theoretical probability, as well as the idea that experimental probability gets closer to the actual value with more trials. You could give the candy to the person with the best guess at the end!
6.)  Go on a spooky (paper) scavenger hunt. Use some grid paper to map out a spooky place (graveyard, haunted mansion, etc...)  Make sure you put several landmarks on your map, as well as a scale.  Give students clues to move from place to place on the map.  Clues can vary based on what topics you would like to review, such as move north 5(4-2) feet, or find the area of the haunted church, divide it by the y-coordinate of the broken gravestone and move this many spaces to the east. Then determine a final location that students will reach at the end of the scavenger hunt. You can grab a similar activity in my store if this sounds perfect for your class.
7.) Teach random sampling with candy.  Have a large bag of Halloween candy.  Before you begin, have a discussion with your class about how to record their candy.  For example, are you recording each type of candy separately (Skittles, Starburst, Snickers, Reese's, DumDums, etc...) or are you recording by categories (fruit, chocolate, hard candy, etc...).  Have each student grab a handful of candy and record each piece of candy in their handful.  After they have recorded what they drew, they can return the candy to the bag.  Each person should then figure the percent of each type of candy that they had in their sample.  Once every student has had a chance to analyze a random sample, compare the variance between the samples, and then compare it to the overall composition of the bag.
8.)  Model the spread of the zombie apocalypse. Hand out cards to your class; mark a couple of them with the word zombie while the rest are blank.  Students should keep their cards a secret.  Have everyone in class shake the hands of two of their classmates.  Once students return to their seats, reveal who the "zombies" were.  Next, have everyone who shook the hands of the zombies come to the front of the room and roll a dice.  If they roll an even number, that student becomes infected with the zombie virus; an odd number means they are spared.  See how many zombies you now have.  Collect the cards back up, add the required number of zombie cards, and continue for another round.  Make sure that you track the number of zombies through each round of the simulation. You could also use this online simulator to show the spread of the virus...it is actually a forest fire simulator, but I think you could use it for this too.  Or if you would rather focus on finding the zombie cure, I've got this cool zombie activity in my store where students will use ratios and circumference to cure the zombie apocalypse.
9.)  Compare your classes' favorite monster to favorite movie monsters. Have students vote for their favorite monster between witch, zombie, vampire, and werewolf.  Provide students with data about money grossed from movies featuring each type of monster.  Students could then do an analysis of how their favorite monsters compared to the monsters that have made the most money at the box office (find the movie data here).  This could include different data displays. 
10.)  Analyze the earnings of different Halloween movies.  Have students find data about the money earned for a variety of Halloween movies. Make sure to give them lots of suggestions for different types of movies.  A few suggestions include Casper, The Addams Family, Hotel Transylvania, Paranorman, Halloween, The Omen, The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hocus Pocus, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monster House, Beetlejuice, Corpse Bride, The Haunted Mansion, and Sleepy Hollow.  After students have the data for money earned, they can analyze the "most successful" movies.  Are the most successful Halloween movies funny, scary, creepy or what?
11.)  Analyze the nutrition information of different types of candy.  Provide students with nutritional information for a variety of types of Halloween candy.  Have students analyze the calories and total fat in a handful of Halloween candy.  To extend this even further, you could have students figure out how many minutes they would have to run (or walk or bike, etc...) to burn the calories in the candy they picked.