Candy Corn Learning Activities

Love it or hate it, candy corn is a graphic shape and fun colors that’s a great theme for learning activities around Halloween. Whether you use actual candy in your activities or just candy shaped or colored objects, there are lots of things you can do.

Preschoolers can make this easy torn paper candy corn craft from Thriving Home Blog, and a bunch of them would make a great bunting style classroom decoration.

Practice counting from 1 to 20 with the free candy corn counting cards printable from Primary Playground. You can use actual candy corn to count out the numbers, or try pop poms or buttons in orange and yellow if you don’t want to play with food in the classroom.

Get more candy corn math printables from Math Geek Mama. Her set includes counting to 100 with candy corn, candy corn counting mats and three-part puzzles with the number, the word and dots to count.

This Reading Mama has a great post from Tot Schooling all about using candy corn as manipulatives for fall activities. It includes free printables where you can use candy corn to trace the upper case letters of the alphabet, count to 10 using one-to-one correspondence, and build fine-motor skills by using candy corn to decorate a tree and a jack o’lantern.

Little Zizzers has more candy corn printables, including making patterns, math and bingo (perfect for a classroom Halloween party!).

Get young kids introduced to coding without a computer with this simple and fun candy corn coding activity from Forward with Fun. Print out the maze and use candy corn as your direction arrows to navigate the maze without running into any of the obstacles. Even with the relatively easy project kids are already learning the basics of coding such as directional inputs (and that diagonal is not an option) and avoiding redundant code.

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Candy Corn Math Activities

The celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe is important throughout Mexico and other parts of the world. Her feast day is Dec. 12, and the celebrations honoring her appearance to Juan Diego in 1531 begin a few days before that.

Whether you celebrate yourself or just want to share about the celebration at home or in your classroom, Las Mañanitas: The Beautiful Celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a good place to start. The book, by Ernesto Joel Vega Rosales and Jeanette Gonzalez Seneviratne, with illustrations by Dana Sanmar, tells the story of a family’s celebration of the feast day in both English and Spanish.

They prepare with a novena, which is nine days of prayers and preparations. The children, Lucia and Pablo, are given special outfits made by their grandmother that look like what Juan Diego might have worn when he saw Our Lady. The book describes the prayers that are made each day, such as a prayer for respect for life, for families and for the indigenous people of the Americas, to name a few.

As told in the book, Juan Diego was a native Mexican born near modern day Mexico City. His given name was Cuaauhtlatoatzin, which means “He who speaks like an eagle.” When he converted to Christianity his name was changed to Juan Diego, and as he walked to church he passed a hill called Tepeyac. One day he heard the birds singing especially beautifully and a voice called him to go to the top of the hill.

There he saw Our Lady of Guadalupe, who asked him to tell the bishop she wanted a chapel built in her name at the foot of the hill. The bishop asked for a sign that Juan Diego really saw her, and later she had him collect flowers that she blessed and take them to the bishop. When Juan Diego dropped the flowers, an image of Our Lady could be seen on his cloak, which is still on display in her basilica to this day.

The feast day is celebrated as mañanitas, which includes singing, indigenous music and dancing, and children presenting flowers to Our Lady. Juan Diego is remembered today as being humble, brave and faithful, and was the first indigenous American made a saint.

The book is colorful and tells the story in a clear way, and it’s fun to have it both in English and Spanish if you teach Spanish or speak Spanish at home or in the classroom. It’s a great way to learn the basics of the celebration and the story of Juan Diego and why he is still remembered today.

About the book: 40 pages, paperback, published 2024 by Loyola Press. Suggested retail price $14.99.

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