But whether you’re taking your kids trick or treating, or having a party, Halloween can actually be a fun educational experience without kids even noticing they’re learning.

So here’s a plan to make the night of frights include a little math and science.

Spooky Science

Decorations that make you scared and a little smarter:

Scary “Growing” Ghost

(demonstrates chemical reactions)
You’ll need: ¼ cup vinegar / 2 TB baking soda/ plastic water bottle/ balloon/ a funnel/ Sharpie marker.

Draw ghost eyes and mouth on the balloon with the Sharpie. Pour the vinegar into the plastic bottle. Place the funnel in the balloon and fill with the baking soda. Pinch off the balloon to prevent the baking soda from spilling and stretch the balloon over the open bottle top. Now release the baking soda into the bottle and watch as the balloon fills and the scary ghost “grows,” demonstrating a chemical reaction.

What we learn: When the two chemicals are mixed, they form a third, carbonic acid, which makes carbon dioxide gas bubbles that blow up the balloon.

Screaming Balloon

(demonstrates sound from friction and vibration)

You’ll need: a balloon/ an ordinary metal nut (hex nut)/ Sharpie marker.

Draw a scary screaming face on the balloon. Place the nut inside and blow up the balloon to ¾ full. Tie the end.

Now start to gyrate the balloon in circles to get the nut rolling around the inside. Eventually as it rolls faster and faster inside the balloon it will start to “scream.”

What we learn: Friction slows the nut down as it rubs against the balloon and the rubbing makes it vibrate. This vibration turns to acoustic energy, or sound.

Glow In The Dark Ghost

(demonstrates fluorescence)
You’ll need: dish soap/ paper/ scissors/ masking or painters tape/ a sponge/ a black light bulb or a black light (available where Halloween decorations are sold).

Draw a simple ghost shape on a piece of paper and cut it out. Now place the paper where you want the glowing ghost, and put two circles of tape where the eyes should go. Using the paper as a stencil, sponge the dish soap into the hole in the paper with a light even dab, then remove the tape circles. When you shine the black light on it, the ghost will glow.

What we learn: Brightening agents are suspended in the dish soap to make clothes seem whiter, and they react under the black light, creating an emission of light as a glow, we call “fluorescence.”

Candy Calculations:

Once kids have brought home their big haul, here are some uses for the candy other than eating it all:

How Many Candies?

(Estimating)
You’ll need: Halloween candy/ a large glass jar/ pencil and paper.

Pour all the candy in a jar and put on the lid. Put in candy with different sizes and fill it up. Now write down the different names of candies on the paper. Have the children study the jar and write down their estimates of each kind of candy next to the name. Then empty the jar and count each kind. Compare to the estimates

What we learn: Builds skills at estimating.

Candy Sorting

(Graphing)
You’ll need: Halloween candy/ pencil and large paper.

Make rows on a large piece of paper for each type of candy and write the candy name. Have the children guess which rows will be the longest and shortest, based on the pile of candy. Then have them sort the candy into the rows.

What we learn: Graphing teaches us how to visualize differences in quantity. It shows us the relationships between things. Some are twice as many as others. Some are three times as many, etc.

Candy Patterns

(Patterning)
You’ll need: Halloween candy

Have children lay out their candy on the floor or a table, in AB patterns, ABA patterns and ABC patterns.

What we learn: Strengthens pattern building.

Halloween can offer treats that are also food for thought! Allowing parents to get in a little extra brain stretching wherever you can.

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Creative Child Magazine gave us their Preferred Choice Award. The Tillywig Toy Awards gave the series it’s Brain Child Award. The Dove Foundation offered their Family Approved Seal. And the PTPA gave us their Media Seal of Approval.

This was a great follow up to the series going on sale successfully across the US and in England at the start of the year, with sales planned for Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Japan and Germany. In truth we’ve been amazed at how far reaching the combined series have been, with hundreds of thousands of units shipped of our first effort, “Your Child Can Read,” and sales moving nicely for “Your Child Can Discover.”

Productive Playhouse had a blast making this last series, which allowed us to combine live action, computer and cell animation, our new mascot puppet Benji, and a cast of amazing kids, some of whom have grown up from our first series to our third. The YBC series have given us a chance to travel from factories to fire stations to critter farms to aquariums, covering gymnastics to jump rope competitions in our effort to explore subjects that push learning for young children to the maximum potential.

We believe sincerely that when ideas are explained correctly, clearly and dynamically, there is no limit to what level kids can actually learn.

It’s been a pretty great year and these awards were a confirmation that knocked it out of the park.

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Were we high above the Serengeti? Or somewhere deep in the African Veldt? Actually we were in Thousand Oaks California, on the mountain-topped location of Jules Sylvester’s company “Reptile Rentals.” Here Jules cares for and provides a variety of venomous snakes, alligators, insects, lizards, mice, rats, spiders, tortoises and butterflies to the film and television industry, and today he was kindly opening his farm to Productive Playhouse for our “Your Child Can Read” series.

We chose to illustrate vocabulary words with live footage of these wild and dangerous creatures, to thrill kids into learning the words. It seemed like a smart plan until I set down my gear inside the python house. I always thought snakes moved slowly, but it’s a good thing I learned otherwise through the bars of a cage, because the 14 foot white python laid silently, then snapped like a bear-trap around an unsuspecting mouse. Not footage I would include in the series. A tarantula creeping silently through the grass I caught earlier was thrilling enough.

Jules has been training animals for the film industry for twenty years and he’s had his share of serious bites, scratches and near misses. But today the only creature that makes him nervous is the centipede. He uses a long mechanical stick to chase down the lightning fast animal and get him back in his cage. Nearby, a tree starts to move in a strange fashion, and I realize it’s a stick bug, which looks as much like a tree as any tree I’ve seen.

After three hours of capturing every form of creature, we wrap up the shoot. As I put my gear in the trunk I notice a four foot snake working his way across the parking gravel. “One of ‘em get out?” I ask. Jules shakes his head. “He’s a new one. Haven’t seen him before.”

When I get down the mountain, I drink two quarts of water in a convenience store and think to myself: “Yup, this is the kind of class I always wanted to learn from when I was a kid.” And so it is…

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