Mommy's Little Helper: candy canes

Showing posts with label candy canes. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Candy Canes

Today we talked about candy canes. My son was really excited about this topic!

He enjoyed hanging some on our Christmas Tree.

He also enjoyed painting a candy cane green and red.

I didn't take pictures of the rest of our candy cane activities, but you can look at previous posts for the activities and links to them.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Candy Cane Preschool Theme

Today we talked about candy canes! I have to remind myself (especially this time of the year) that we don't have to do every cute and fun idea that I come across. There are just too many!

I cute out some felt in the shape of a candy cane and some stripes so that my son could make his own using felt. He enjoys being able to play with things on the flannel board.

We also made shapes out of candy canes. He wanted to make sure we had one that looked like a J. This idea came from Teach Preschool.

I really like to read this mini book about candy canes because it helps young children understand why candy canes are seen around Christmas time at their level.

Here is a fun candy cane matching game. It gets a little tricky since some of the patterns are quite similar.

I forgot to take a picture of this, but check out this link for a fun file folder candy cane/stocking matching game.

This printable pack has a lot of Christmas activities including the stocking and candy cane counting game.

2 Teaching Mommies has a fun Candy Cane Pack to check out including this number puzzle.

Our Little Monkey's also has a real cute candy cane pack including these writing practice sheets.

Confessions of a Homeschooler has a Christmas Activity pack that includes counting these candy canes.

My son had fun painting a candy cane red and yellow. We talked about patterns and how you can find different patterns on different flavors of candy canes.

Of course, we needed to taste test the different flavors of candy canes that we had!

We put a candy cane in warm water and found out the red stripes disappear! Teach Preschool is where I found this idea. My son was fascinated by this.

I painted my son's hand and we made a hand print candy cane. He got a kick out of that.

Here are all the different flavors of candy canes we put up on our tree. Of course, we took some broken ones so we could melt them a little and bend them into shapes.

To melt candy canes I put them into the oven at 250 degrees for about 5 minutes. The time will vary so you just have to watch. Here are some instructions. The candy canes are really too hot for little ones to touch when they are the most bendable, but my son enjoyed watching me bend and make letters and shapes.

Here is a little foam candy cane. It is the same idea as the felt candy canes, but using foam.

You can check out our 2012, 2011, and 2010 posts to see what we have done in the past!

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Candy Canes

Today we had a candy cane theme. It's always a lot of fun and a great opportunity to talk about patterns.

I made this cute file folder color matching game a while back that is fun although too easy for my 5 year old at this time, but we still did it.

This is a fun number recognition game. You put a number up and have your child put that many candy canes "in" the stocking.

Confessions of a Homeschooler has a fun Christmas Preschool pack that includes this candy cane counting activity.

I like to use this Candy Cane mini book to explain different things that a candy cane symbolizes.

My son loves to paint so he painted a candy cane. My two year old also had fun painting one for himself as well.

After they dried we cut them out. I am not sure why my 5 year old picked orange and green, but there you go. My 2 year old was a bit more festive with red and green.

We taste tested a bunch of different flavors of candy canes. I didn't realize how many different flavors are out there now a days. We found Swedish fish flavored, Jolly Rancher, Bright Crawlers, and a whole lot more. In the end with all the varieties my son said peppermint was his favorite. :)

This is a real fun activity, but preschoolers still need a lot of help with that. You cook candy canes and then you can bend them into different shapes. They still need to be warm or they will break. You can stick them back in the oven though and they will go back to being bendable. My son did some different shapes and I wrote out some names. The directions I followed are found at Make and Takes. Her directions say 10 minutes however when I did it last year 10 minutes melted my batch completely. 5 minutes worked much better for me. It's just going to depend on your oven so beware.

My son also made a beaded candy cane that we hung on the tree. This time he did green and yellow. You just need pipe cleaner and beads for this activity.

2 Teaching Mommies has a fun Candy Cane pack
They also have a candy cane coloring and counting book
Here is a matching game we do that I didn't take a picture of.
We also did a candy cane coloring page from this coloring pack
And a dot-to-dot found here.

You can also check out our candy cane themed day from 2011 here and from 2010 here.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Candy Canes

Today we talked about candy canes. There were a couple of things I wanted my son to take away from this lesson. I am hoping he did. The first is that a candy cane is a Christmas symbol. If you turn a candy cane upside down it looks like the letter "J" as in Jesus. Also it looks like a Shepard's crook. This can help us think of Jesus' birth because an angel appeared to Shepard's and they visited Christ, but also Jesus is our Shepard. I shared this little Candy Cane booklet to help show these things.

The other thing I focused on was patterns because candy canes are a great source for talking about patterns.

You can check out my Candy Cane post from last year here.

We taste tested different flavors of candy canes. My son said he liked them all, but the red one was his favorite. It was a Starburst flavor.

We took some pipe cleaner and beads and made a candy cane (using a red and pink pattern). This is now handing on our tree.

My son loves to paint. He painted this candy cane purple and white (again focusing on making a pattern.)

We tried out this idea. Shaping candy canes. It was fun, but takes some experimenting because they need to be just the right amount of warm so they don't break but not too warm or you'll end up with...

something that looks like this... The directions said ten minutes and so I put them in and didn't check on them until the timer rand and I got these, which are kind of cool in their own way, but not what we were going for. Just be aware to keep watch on them.