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35 Chocolate Activities from Becky Settlemoir and Friends!

  1. Ask students to guess how many M&M's are in a bag.

  2. Have students graph M&M colors individually and as a class.

  3. Students will have fun creating patterns with M&M's.

  4. Can students create a picture using candy?

  5. Help students graph favorite chocolate candy bars.

  6. Challenge students to weigh enough M&M's on a balance scale to equal scissors, a pencil, glue, a marker, etc.

  7. Watch the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with your class.

  8. Watch the video Chocolate Fever with your class.

  9. Explain that a long time ago, a group of people used cacao beans as money. Have students pretend that the United States will be using M&M's for money. Discuss the good points and the bad points. Have them write a story about the day they went shopping with M&M's.

  10. Have students make a list of everything they can think of that has chocolate in it. Have students incorporate these ideas into stories: (1) The Day It Rained Chocolate (2) What will I do? I'm locked in a candy store. (3) This is so weird! I took a bite of my _____ bar and. ... (4) A giant chocolate bar came up to me and started crying saying ... (5) One morning, I woke up and had a bad case of chocolate fever/chocolate sniffles/chocolate pops.

  11. Provide M&M's for students to use as counters for addition and subtraction problems.

  12. Make and share s'mores with your class.

  13. Have students estimate the number of Chocolate Kisses in a bag.

  14. Be daring: Let your students finger-paint with chocolate pudding or chocolate syrup.

  15. Make chocolate pudding together.

  16. Ask students to write in their journals about the M&M Math activity.

  17. Have students create acrostic poems about chocolate, Snickers bars, or Hershey's bars.

  18. Ask each student to bring in their favorite candy bar and graph the results. Save the wrappers for other candy projects.

  19. Read The Chocolate Touch, by Patrick Skene Catling, with students.

  20. Ask students to bring in recipes that contain chocolate and make a class cookbook.

  21. Help students find on a map where cacao is grown.

  22. Have students brainstorm the names of different chocolate candy bars and put the names in ABC order.

  23. We have chocolate covered peanuts, raisins, cherries, pretzels, ants, etc. ... Have students brainstorm a list of foods that would taste better with chocolate.

  24. Challenge students to see how many words they can make from the word chocolate.

  25. Ask students to make a list of ch- words.

  26. Read The Doorbell Rang, by Pat Hutchins, with your class and work on fractions.

  27. Use Cookie Crisp cereal for math manipulatives to teach addition and subtraction.

  28. Help students make chocolate chip cookies with mini, regular, and one big chocolate chip and then taste-test to see how many kids like each kind best. Have students graph the results.

  29. Challenge students to estimate how many chips are in different cookies, and then take them apart, as an archaeologist does, and find out how many are really there. Help them compare and graph their results. You may find out how the cookies are alike or different.

  30. Help students make chocolate ice cream in a bag. Get the step-by-step instructions at http://www.sme.org/memb/neweek/actice.htm Plastic Bag Ice Cream.

  31. Help students make instant chocolate pudding, and then let them trace their names and other letters in it (poured on waxed paper on desks), and then eat it with their fingers!

  32. As a class, write to the Hershey (Pennsylvania) Chamber of Commerce.

  33. As a class, rewrite "The Gingerbread Man" and call it "The Chocolate Man." Then make a chocolate cake in a 9-inch by 11-inch pan and cut out a large chocolate person. Have the children help you decorate with whipped cream and gumdrops or jelly beans.

  34. Write chocolate companies for teacher packets.

  35. Use Hershey chocolate bars, the ones that can be broken into 12 pieces to teach about fractions: 1/2 means 1 out of 2 equal pieces and so on. Then ask each student what fraction of the candy bar he or she wants to eat. Give choices -- 1/2, 1/4, or 1/12 (99 percent will choose 1/12 at first).

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