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.

Confessions of a Homeschooler has some fun candy cane activities in her Christmas Pack that we did.

I found this fun Candy Cane/Stocking file folder matching game a few years back and it continues to be fun.

This fun little number game we found at Little Piles Everywhere.

We found this fun little activity to do as well from The Chocolate Muffin Tree.

We also have a matching game that I didn't take a picture of that is pretty fun.