So, this probably looks like an art lesson (and it is), but then (like magic) it becomes a fun Halloween math lesson chock full of data practice. The kids love it! And honestly, all the finished Freaky Frankies are adorable.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way. If you’re thinking you can’t do this lesson because you can’t draw, trust me … you can. Using simple shapes and lines, you can definitely teach kids how to draw a Freaky Frankie. And just to be sure, I broke him up into little steps.
See? How easy is this?👇
SO WHAT’S A FREAKY FRANKIE?
I can get a whole week’s worth of work out of this one lesson. It starts as a directed drawing that includes a glyph key. This gives the kids an opportunity to respond with personal choices throughout the art lesson. This is also part of what makes each Frankie unique.
For example, the mouth each child draws depends on whether or not they’ll be buying their costume or making their costume. And whether they prefer to trick or treat before dark or after dark will determine the color of their neck bolts. The kids love the glyph elements. To them, it feels like they’re making something with a secret code!
And actually, they kind of are.
When kids learn how to use the glyph key, they’ll be able to look at this drawing and know that this child:
- is a boy
- will be buying his costume
- plans to carve a happy-faced pumpkin
- goes trick-or-treating before dark
- and prefers fruity candy over chocolate candy
That’s the first part of this fun Halloween math activity. Because it ultimately leads to multiple math lessons, we do the directed drawing during our math block. If you’re a little bit worried about what a surprise walkthrough might look like while you and your kids are drawing Frankensteins during math, just invite your administrator to come back the next day.😉
NOW … FOR SOME FUN HALLOWEEN MATH
It’s day two and all your Freaky Frankies are done (and so cute)! To prepare for the math lesson, the children will need to see everyone’s drawing. You can either post the class collection on a wall or leave each child’s drawing on his or her desk.
If you want to work all together and guide the children through the data collection, I recommend posting all the pictures where everyone can see them at the same time. However, if you’d rather have the kids up and moving, keep the drawings on the desks and let children work in pairs. As partners, they can circulate around the room and collect the data from each drawing.
For me, I have found it works best if I pair the kids and work through one glyph element at a time. This helps to prevent some kids from feeling overwhelmed. For example, we start by circulating around the room looking only at the eyes on each Frankie. If a Frankie has eyelids, we know the artist is a boy and we make a tally mark in the boy section of the sheet. But if the eyes don’t have lids, we know the artist is a girl and we note a tally in the section for girls.
Between each glyph element, we gather back together to see if we all came up with the same number of tallies per section. If there are inconsistencies, I model my own counting and recording. Then the students can make adjustments on their own sheets, if needed.
Once we’re done collecting the data on the eyes, we move on to the mouth to see how many children will be making their own costumes and how many will be buying one instead. We continue in this way until we’ve covered each of the five glyph elements. Depending on your students’ needs and the length of your math block, this may take 2 days.
GRAPHING AND ANALYZING CLASS DATA
The next day, we use the tally marks we collected the day before to graph our data. If your students are already familiar with bar graphs, this probably won’t take long. It’s just a matter of transferring the totals to the correct bar on the graphing sheet.
After we graph the data, we dive into some deeper-thinking math work. It’s time to analyze the data, which often requires more critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Some questions are straight forward like:
- How many people prefer to carve scary pumpkins?
- How many people do not prefer chocolate candy?
Other questions call for a math operation, such as:
- Which number is smaller? Is it the number of boys or the number of girls? How much smaller is that number?
The challenge question is my favorite because it requires the children to look at two different pieces of information to determine the answer:
- How many girls will be making their own costume?
The kids get such a kick out of solving the challenge question, we often end up brainstorming more questions that are similar, like:
- How many boys prefer chocolate over fruit candy?
- How many girls like scary pumpkin faces? Is it more or less than boys?
The reason the kids are so interested in this math lesson is because it’s about them! It’s one of my favorite win-win Halloween activities.
If you’re in a school with a 1:1 tech plan (or resource cart), your kids can make their Freaky Frankies on a device. For student work that is digital, you can create a quick slide show of each sample and go through them that way during the math lesson. However, they’re just as cute drawn on construction paper with markers. If you do it this way, you’ll have actual samples to display throughout the classroom when the lesson is done.
The resource includes every student sheet featured in this blog post and can be found here 👉 FREAKY FRANKIES: HALLOWEEN MATH ACTIVITY. It’s best suited for kids in first and second grades, but could also be used with third graders who need a little extra math support.
If your students like this fun Halloween math lesson, they might also enjoy math glyphs and graphing activities for other holidays:
- QUIRKY TURKEYS: A THANKSGIVING MATH ACTIVITY👇
- LOVE BUGS: A VALENTINE’S DAY MATH ACTIVITY
- LUCKY LEPRECHAUNS: A ST. PATRICK’S DAY MATH LESSON
- FUNNY BUNNIES: AN EASTER-THEMED MATH GLYPH AND GRAPH
Happy teaching!
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