Explore + Discover Together: Celebrate with Candles
Participants discover many ways that people around the world use light in various holiday celebrations, then create a decorative candle craft.
Full Program Description
Explore holidays from various cultures that use candles as part of the celebrations. Then create a festive and unique set of candles.
“Tall, I am young; short, I am old, while with life I glow; wind is my foe. What am I?”
Each child will create one candleholder set. The set consists of a wooden block with three glass jars hot-glued to the block. With your supervision, children will fill the jars with small decorative items such as beads. Then an adult will hot glue a cork stopper onto the bottle to seal it. If this craft is not appropriate for your child, please find another program that better suits your child’s development.
Supplies
- wood blocks (I used 6″ x 1″ x 1″)
- small glass or plastic jars with lids
- assorted seed beads, tiny pompoms, sequins, bits of colored cellophane, or anything other decorative items that will fit inside the small jars
- hot glue
- candles
- paint sticks or markers to decorate the wood blocks
- printed scavenger hunt answer sheets
- printed scavenger hunt stickers to place on the answer sheets
- printed scavenger hunt images to hang on the walls
- if desired, finger lights or battery-operated tea lights
- if desired, flashlight to read book
Assets
scavenger hunt | printable 17″ x 11″ pdf | copy & edit in Canva | holiday images to print on round labels
very basic instructions | pdf | copy & edit in Canva |
Program content
- welcome song or chant
- freeze dance with finger lights
- brainstormed when candles are used in their families
- candles finger play (but used whole bodies, standing during chant and falling down when being blown out)
- read parts of Shine-a-Light Holidays and Celebrations by Carron Brown and Ipek Konak
- discussion: why do people use candles, what’s the same, what’s different
- introduced activities (scavenger hunt, craft, and wishes)
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