What to do with all that Candy?

Halloween has come and gone and now we have a house full of candy.  What to do with it?

In our house we have a tradition, started years ago when Maren first went trick or treating.  We count the candy, then the child gets to pick out 15 pieces to do whatever they want with.  They can eat it all at once or save it, I don't care.  It's theirs.  The rest they give to mommy in exchange for a book.  We go to the local bookstore and they can pick out whatever book they like (they're still young enough that I'm usually able to influence them a bit, and I have only had to say "no" on a couple of occasions).  Maren likes to choose a Klutz craft book, or an American Girl book.  Joshua usually finds something sportsy.  They love picking out a book at the bookstore, since it's not something we do often due to limited funds.

So then, what do I do with all that candy?  I save some to use as incentives, some for school math games like smarties, m&ms, and other little candies, and some for decorating gingerbread houses in December.  Some of the lollipops and hard candies like Jolly Ranchers get put in our 72 hour kits.  A couple of times we have made "monster cookies", where you make a basic chocolate chip cookie dough but add all your chocolate candies cut up instead of chocolate chips.

But before we do any of the choosing 15, we do some school activities with our candy.  We always sort into piles, and then make a graph, and then read and compare our graphs to see who had the most or least of what.  This year I had bought a balance scale for our homeschool, so we compared the mass of different candies.  We tried to find equal masses, and we used the gram weights to find the mass of a few.  On a couple of the candy packages it said how many grams were supposed to be in there, so we checked to make sure it was true.  The package was a couple of grams off.