Life Size Candy Land

Life Size Candy Land is an event I've wanted to put on for some time. This past fall, I finally managed it. I drew inspiration from the usual places (PUBYAC, other awesome librarians, Pinterest) including the following:

• Compilation in PUBYAC Archives (especially Laura's writeup that she put in Google Drive)
• Erin
• Mollie
• Abby
• Liz
• My Candy Land Pinterest Board

In my research, I discovered you can make almost anything work for decorations. Mostly I used what I had whether in its original form or re-purposed as something else.

Tiles were construction paper. I went with a bright pastel color scheme. I didn't tape down the paper and it didn't move too much. When it did, we just readjusted.

Gingerbread Tree: The meeting room already has a tree mural so I just added a sign and a gingerbread family (I used free clipart from the blog The Art of Teaching in Today's World. I printed them in different sizes on brown cardstock and colored in the details with Sharpies.)

Gumdrop Mountains: green plastic table cloths and a sign. I made the gumdrops using plastic flowerpots I'd bought to use for my Peter Rabbit Party. I covered them with colored tissue paper, applied white glue, and dipped them in Epsom salts.

Peppermint Forest: White and red table cloths, plastic candy canes in various sizes. The ribbon tree is a dowel with different lengths of peppermint type ribbon and bows on top (I raided my personal holiday decorations for the ribbon.)

Licorice Woods: Use What You Have! The meeting room has a coffee table that I use for my CD player, books, and schedules during storytime. We upended it, draped it with a black plastic tablecloth, added red crepe paper streamers and a sign.

Peanut Acres: Yellow Gold plastic table cloth, packing peanuts, sign, and a dog I made with a thrift store basket, a couple of red bandannas, and some thin brown cardboard.

Lollipop Woods: colorful plastic tablecloths, a sign, and the lollipops I made out of dowels, paper plates, cellophane, and ribbon.

Chocolate Swamp: brown plastic tablecloths, a sign, and giant Hershey's Kisses my co-worker constructed with packing paper, tape, and aluminum foil.

Candy Castle: Yellow plastic tablecloth, a sign, candies made with cellophane, ribbon, and crinkle paper, and the castle my co-worker and I made with cardboard, paper, and craft foam details

Sign-in Table: The sign-in sheet was a bit different. I asked for a last name and the number in the group. If anybody played again, I counted them again. The stickers were to help players remember what order their turns were.

I considered several options for game play (giant dice and spinners) before I decided pieces of construction paper (matching the tiles) in paper bags would work wonderfully.

In case we had a rush and needed to have people wait, I printed out Candy Land character coloring sheets to keep the kids occupied.

When they finished playing, every child received a dumdum.

Older kids enjoyed playing a fast version of the game: when you draw a color move 2 spaces ahead instead of 1.

This was a very fun well-attended event (despite soccer games) and I'm doing it again this month.