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Candy Corn Learning Activities

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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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Christmas STEM Projects

Holidays are a great time to pull in some themed STEM projects. Even kids who aren’t usually into science can get excited about making a reindeer fly or making a Christmas tree out of 3D shapes. Check out these fun Christmas STEM activities to try in your classroom or at home.

Speaking of making reindeer fly, there are lots of different takes on this engineering challenge. In the instructions from The Educator’s Spin on it, kids make a reindeer from recycled materials, then use a string to make it “fly.” You can also do this with a balloon, like in this version from Team Cartwright.

And that Christmas tree project? That one is from Steamsational, and it calls for making a bunch of 3D triangles you then assemble into a tree. The post includes all the tips you’ll need and a printable template for making the triangles.

Another cute idea from Steamsational is making Santa’s sleigh out of an egg carton. Give kids design challenges such as that Santa must stay in the sleigh, it should be able to move and pull weight. It’s so fun to see what kids come up with.

Science Sparks has a printable book full of Christmas-themed experiments with templates kids can cut out and use to make spinning sleighs, shadow puppets, a paper tube to test how much weight it can hold and more. These activities are really low prep beyond the printing, so they’re great when you need to fill a little time at home or at school.

If you have Legos and jingle bells you can make a simple engineering challenge by having kids build mazes that the bells can roll through. Get the details from Innovation Kids Lab. (And check out this fun book of Lego Christmas ornaments!)

Of course you can also put a Christmas spin on classic STEM activities, like making a baking soda volcano in a plastic or glass ball ornament (Little Bins for Little Hands), red and green magic milk (Fun Learning for Kids), Borax crystal ornaments (Go Science Kids) and more!

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