This candy cane craft idea came from my daughter’s Montessori school. It is a lesson placed on the shelf every year in the 3-6 year old classroom. You can use all colors of beads. But for the sake of continuity on our Christmas tree, we just used red and white beads.
Even my two-year-old really enjoyed this craft. And with a little help from her big sister, the craft held her attention long enough to make a whole candy cane. That is a lot of work for her age, to get all those beads on a pipe cleaner. It’s also wonderful for the development of fine motor skills, which is why it’s placed in the Montessori classroom.
This ornament craft sat in our dinning room all weekend – a weekend where we ditched are agendas and did nothing other than crafts, cut down a tree, and put it up. Between the three girls the candy cane “lesson” was visited often enough that our tree is now filled with candy canes.
The directions are simple. Take one pipe cleaner, put a bead at one end and bend the pipe cleaner over it. That holds the bead in place and keeps all the rest of the beads from slipping off. Then fill the pipe cleaner with beads and do the same trick at the finished end. Then bend down the top to shape a candy cane and hang it right on your tree.
Children can make a pattern, or in the case of my two-year-old, just put them on any which way. There is never any rules to crafting with children. If you have only toddler age children, you might want to cut the pipe cleaners in half so the task is not so long.
For another variation of this, I provided glittery red pipe cleaners and the girls twisted them together with the white ones.
Pipe cleaners are a wonderful, inexpensive material with multiple uses of fun. I love the open ended play they provide. (They make great stocking stuffers too!)
To recap our week of crafts so far, here are links to the other posts on our ornaments for our homemade Christmas tree. There was finger knitting garland, upcycled burlap balls and ornaments made from stencils. Still to come is garland from felt and photos from tree stumps. Hopefully that will keep you stumped! Come back for more crafting soon.
