As I have mentioned before, I just love candy canes so we are always exploring candy canes through different content areas in my classroom for about a whole month!!
These are just little plastic candy cane ornaments you can get at the Dollar Store in bags. I gave each of my pre-k students a set of five candy canes (you can use real ones or make some for this activity) during our circle time. They used one of my DIY felt boards as a counting board for this activity…
Each of the children spread out their candy canes and counted them. Then I gave different kinds of instructions like, “If you take away one candy cane then how many will you have left?” The children would remove and count the remaining number of candy canes…
And once we got to zero then we began adding our candy canes. Â I would say something like, “If you add one candy cane, how many do you have now?”
After we did a little adding and subtracting, then we used our candy canes to make designs on our boards. We discovered we can make a few letters…
And shapes…
And other fun designs…
Super simple math with a candy cane!