How to Make Educational Trick or Treat Bags for Students

Teachers may want to celebrate Halloween with their students but wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't asking them to learn something. This trick or treat bag idea combines both entertainment with education in such a way that students won't even realize they are learning. You can hand these bags out at the end of the day and feel good knowing the kids will go home and do a few exercises to stimulate their brains.

Things You'll Need

• Brown paper lunch bags
• Markers
• Halloween stick-ons
• Halloween stamps
• Ink pads
• Halloween candy bracelets or necklaces
• Gummy mummies
• Boxes of green gelatin
• Gummy eyeballs
• Hershey bar
• Computer
• Printer
• Cardboard
• Paper
• Pen

Instructions

1. Create the bags. Take out as many brown paper lunch bags as you have students. Decorate them by writing their names in bubble letters with a marker. Then add some Halloween stick-ons or stamps. They don't all have to be the same so use your imagination and creativity when making each one.

2. Buy some candy bracelets or necklaces for the treat bags. These are great because they have a lot of beads on them that can be eaten. Create a math problem to attach to the bracelet or necklace on piece of paper. This math problem should be written for the child receiving it. Write something like, "You have a necklace with 25 beads. If you ate 13 of the beads, how many beads would you have left?" The child can then eat the beads and get the answer to the problem or they can write the answer out on the piece of paper.

3. Add a couple of gummy mummies to each treat bag. Attach a note that gives an important fact about mummies. Ask the children to look up what cultures used to create mummies. Another question you could attach would be when the first Egyptian mummy was discovered or other mummy trivia. A great place for your students to learn about mummies is from the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia (see Resources)

4. Add a box of green gelatin and two gummy eye balls to each treat bag. Attach a recipe for your students to make a scary Halloween bowl full of eyeballs. Instruct the children to follow the recipe on the box and then add the gummy eyes before refrigeration. Make sure they know to get a parents help with the hot water part as gelatin requires hot water and cold water to make. Simple recipes help children to follow directions and practice measuring.

5. Create a Halloween crossword puzzle. You can do this on your computer. Make sure you format the lines to fit in to your treat bag, longer instead of wider. Use Halloween symbols as the answers, but list important facts as the clues. Children will learn about the different symbols of Halloween while enjoying the fun of solving a puzzle. Examples of clues are, "This is picked from a patch and is actually a fruit, not a vegetable." The answer would be "pumpkin." After you print out the puzzle, glue it to a piece of cardboard.

6. Use a Hershey bar to get the kids involved in a science experiment. Halloween is about candy, so adding a Hershey bar to each bag is a good idea. Get the plain Hershey bar that is divided up in to squares. For the experiment, attach the rules to the candy bar on a piece of paper. Each student is to eat half of the candy bar and give the other half to a family member. That family member must eat half and give the other half away. That person must eat half of what they have and give the other half away. How many times can the candy bar be broken in half? This experiment gets really fun, especially towards the end when the candy is so small it is hard to break in half.

Tips & Warnings

• Try to include a question or task for each subject you study in your classroom.

• The final costs for these Halloween bags will depend on how many students you have.

Resources

• Wikipedia: Mummies