Candy Cane Coloring Page
About This Coloring Page
The candy cane is the simplest Christmas shape there is, a hook, and the stripes make it a pattern page before any colour goes on. Each band is already drawn, one after the next, all the way up the stick and round the curve, and the first decision a child makes is which ones to fill.
Every other stripe is the classic answer, and a child who works that out alone has just made a pattern on purpose. The bands are narrow with an edge on both sides, so filling one without wandering into the next is real fine-motor control, and because the result looks so obviously right when it is done, children keep going to the top.
The bow and the present give the page somewhere to go after the stripes: two loops and two tails, then a box with a ribbon across it. The snowflakes around the edge are the small targets for a child who finishes early. Ask what a candy cane tastes like, and where it hangs, and the page is December.
Skills Practiced
How to Use This Coloring Page
- Say the pattern before you start. This one, not that one, this one. Saying it out loud is the lesson; the crayon just follows.
- Follow the curve at the top slowly. The stripes bend round the hook. Stay between the lines; it is handwriting control in disguise.
- Do the bow last. Two loops, two tails, one colour. It is the part that looks hardest and is not.