How to Use M&M Graphing in the Classroom

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 M&M Graphing in the Classroom

📝 This post, M&M Graphing Activities, was originally published in 2012 and has been updated with new information and resources.

This M&M graphing activity was always a huge hit with my students during the Halloween season. After all, what child doesn’t love an activity that lets them play with their food—and eat it when they’re finished?

I often used this activity around Halloween, but it works any time you want to add a little candy to your math practice.

Each student gets a small bag or cup of M&M’s, sorts the candies by color, creates a graph, and then uses the data to answer questions about most, least, and equal amounts. It’s a simple way to practice sorting, graphing, comparing quantities, and interpreting data with something students are VERY interested in!

M&M Graphing Activity

Give each student a small cup or bag of M&M’s along with a copy of the M&M graphing page.

Have students open their candy and place the M&M’s in the space labeled “Place M&M’s Here.”

Students sort their M&M’s by color and use them to complete the graph.

Once their graph is finished, students use their data to answer three questions:

Which color do you have the most of?

Which color do you have the least of?

Which colors, if any, do you have the same amount of?

And yes—once all of the math is finished, it’s finally time to eat the M&M’s!

Turn It Into a Class Graph

Once everyone has completed their individual graph, bring the class together to compare the results.

Talk about what students noticed. Did everyone have the same number of each color? Which colors appeared most often? Which appeared least often? Were there any surprises?

You can take the activity one step further by creating a large class graph and having students add their individual data. Now students can compare the results from one small bag of M&M’s with the data collected from the entire class. When creating the class graph, I recommend counting by 5s or 10s to make all that data a little easier to graph. This is also a great opportunity to talk about how our data changes when we collect information from a larger group.

💚 Grab the M&M Graphing Activities from TPT.

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Make Your Own Bag of M&M’s

Want to keep the M&M fun going? Have students create their own pretend bag of candy!

Give each student the candy circles and M&M wrapper templates. Students choose five colors and decide how many candies of each color they’d like to put in their bag.

Instead of adding an “m” to each candy, have students add the first letter of their own name. Mine became S&S since my name is Stephanie!

Putting the Candy Bag Together

Have students color and cut out their paper candies and add their first initial to each one.

Next, cut out the two wrapper pieces and tape or staple the edges together, leaving one end open. Students can complete the information on the wrapper using a white gel pen or white stickers and then place their paper candies inside.

Now they have their very own bag of candy!

More Ways to Use the Paper M&M’s

Don’t stop with graphing. Once students have created their paper candies, you can use them for all kinds of additional math practice.

Students can count their candies, sort them by color, create patterns, compare quantities, or use their homemade bag to complete the graphing activity again.

You could even have students trade bags with a partner and graph someone else’s candy collection. Because each student chooses their own colors and quantities, they’ll have a completely new set of data to work with.

Learning with M&M’s

There’s something about bringing a familiar treat into a math lesson that immediately gets students interested. They may think they’re just sorting and playing with M&M’s, but they’re actually collecting data, creating graphs, comparing quantities, and using math vocabulary to talk about what they discovered.

And getting to eat the math manipulatives at the end certainly doesn’t hurt!