This lesson is the perfect Halloween/Thanksgiving craft for young children. It lets them experiment with color mixing, cutting, gluing and exploring shapes. I LOVE making textured paper with my students. In fact, I use this technique for all different kinds of holidays. I saw on pinterest where someone had made candy corn with textured paper and I just HAD to do this with my kids. Since we make textured paper all the time, I simply pulled out my “Eric Carle paper making” box that is full of toothbrushes, combs, plastic eggs and sponges and let my kindergarten students have a ball!
To keep the mess manageable, I do centers with my students and when they rotate to me as their “center” we make the paper. The other centers are more independent activities like coloring, reading art books, etc. I have made textured paper with my entire class (many times) but I feel so much less crazy when I do it as one center–and less crazy is good! I created this video awhile ago for my Eric Carle Valentine’s Day heart lesson that gives you an idea of what we do. The colors in the video are red, white and pink, but the process is the same no matter what holiday you use this technique for–simply change the colors.
For the candy corn, I let students “discover” that yellow and red makes orange. However, keep in mind that you want some yellow for your candy corn so for that I gave students orange paper and then let them make all different shades of yellow by mixing it with white. After all the paper was made, I let it dry over night and then I cut it up into workable pieces of paper about 12″ wide. 
Then on a 12″ x 18″ sheet of white paper I drew a large candy corn shape (think triangle with rounded edges). I cut it out and traced 19 of them onto 12″ x 18″ pieces of paper for each of the students in my kindergarten class. I then traced one more large white candy corn, cut it out and then divided it into thirds. I used the bottom two shapes to trace onto the textured paper. I traced 19 copies of the middle shape and the bottom shape onto the different colors of textured paper. Okay, let’s be honest, I had some 5th graders who always want to “help” me do some of the tracing. When I work with kindergarten students I like to “set” their places so when they come in everything they need is already out for them. I posted this picture on Instagram (@artwithjennyk) that shows the tables set up and all ready to go for my students–it saves so much time. 
Each student had one large 12″ x 18″ white paper with the candy corn shape traced on it, 1 piece with the middle shape traced on it, 1 sheet with the bottom shape traced on it, 1 pair of scissors and 1 glue stick. I then had a teacher example (pictured on the left up above) as well as another set of pages that were pre cut but not glued so I could demonstrate to my students how to put their pieces together. Students did a great job with these but I realized that it wasn’t easy for all of them this early in the year to cut all those shapes on the lines …but they sure had fun trying! 
Once the shapes are cut out then have student put the large shape at the bottom and glue it on, then the middle shape and glue it on and then leave the tip of the candy corn white.
Once the two shapes were glued on top of the white candy corn shape, I then showed my students how to trim all the edges so all the shapes fit perfectly. 
The end results were pretty cute! …and best of all, the kids were enganged and loving it!
Thanks for reading and making art with your kids!
