Candy Cane Week

Whoa - I have a lot of catching up to do! Hang on tight as we go back in time to the beginning of December and catch up on all the fun happenings of Christmas month (and beyond!).

Here we are in the week after Thanksgiving that I dubbed "Candycane Week" for our homeschool. I had snatched a free Candy Cane Unit Study from some freebie email that I'm signed up for (I snag a lot more than I ever use from those giveaways, but this one, for some reason, actually got incorporated into our lessons. I penciled in various activities from the packet to fit into our weekly structure of Mondays = Art, Tuesdays = Poetry, Wednesdays = Nature Journaling/Study, Thursdays = Music, and Fridays = Science. Of course there were activities that didn't fit any of our daily categories, so we just squeezed them in as we had time and inclination. It turned out to be such a fun week of candy cane festivities to get us in the Christmas mood. Here are the highlights:

Monday, 29 November 2021: Candy Cane Painting and Drawing Lesson

We cut out candy cane shapes in card stock and then dipped them in a tub of shaving cream that had been swirled with red food coloring. Once they dried, Callie strung them up on a string to make a cute garland.  The kids also enjoyed doing an art for kids hub lesson drawing candy canes (sorry no pics of that, whoops!).

Bonus! After we were done "painting" it made
an excellent sensory activity.

I just have to interject this in here because it's hilarious! So I was going through my 
Google photos albums one evening, matching up its guesses with the correct people
I have saved in my folders. It is amazingly accurate and can spot people in backgrounds
or with sunglasses and hats on and like 99 % of the time the matches are correct. Not this time!
I guess when the algorithm fails, it fails spectacularly. It cracked me right up. Ahem. And now
back to our Candy Cane Week recap.

Finished garland number one.

Finished garland number two.

Tuesday, 30 November 2021: Candy Cane cookies + Candy Cane books

Tuesdays are our poetry teatime days, and while we rarely have any special drink (maybe a little glass of milk if we're feeling fancy), we do quite often make some sort of fun treat. And today's treat was candy cane shaped and colored cookies. (I opted for almond extract in this recipe instead of peppermint extract like I had seen in another recipe and I think that was a great choice. They were delicious!) While we ate our cookies we read a few Candy Cane-related books. (Not exactly poetry teatime, but close enough.)

(Note: A Candy Cane Christmas came from Tomie dePaola's memoir
called Christmas Remembered.)

Wednesday, 1 December 2021: Candy Cane Videos

We didn't have anything nature-y to do with candy canes for our Wednesday, so we substituted a couple of fun youtube videos of how candy canes are made. Here's the one for a handmade version at a candy shop, and here's the factory made kind.

Thursday, 2 December 2021: On Thursdays we do music appreciation and piano lessons. I thought it would be fun to tie in The Nutcracker, since some versions have a dance of the Candy Canes, so we watched that and then listened to a couple of podcast episodes on Classics for Kids about Tchaikovsky.

We also had some fun Candy Cane Math instead of our regular lessons. These were in the packet, and I just printed them off at the library and then wrote in math facts that the kids would know. Sam had addition and subtraction up to 10 and Cal had multiplication. They had fun solving the puzzle as soon as I had it cut out for them.

Friday, 3 December 2021: Candy Cane Science! I was saving the best for last . . . a whole slew of sciencey things roughly candy-cane adjacent that I had found in the packet and supplemented with some rather old pins from pinterest that I dug up.  We grew borax crystals, determined what would make a candy cane dissolve fastest, built a candy cane structure, made peppermint fireworks, and attempted to bend and shape candy canes (this one didn't work so well). What a grand finale of candy cane fun (and learning)!

Pipe cleaner candy canes ready for borax crystal formation.

Writing hypotheses about dissolving candy canes.

The experiment is on!

Meanwhile: let's build something sturdy with candy canes
and hot glue.

Water is winning!

Vinegar in second place.

Milk is hard to see, but it's shrinking, too.
Oil is not doing anything at all.

Peppermint fireworks in a dish.

Softened (and ballooning) candy canes.

But they just snapped instead of bending.

Still smiley all around.